Emerging from an elevator a few dozen floors down, I filed in behind a couple of salarymen and was briefly distracted by glimpses of ads for watches, investment counsellors, and canned coffee ahead of me on the skywalk. I wanted to see the coffee ad—it featured a famous American actor—but as soon as I got an unobstructed view of the screen, the ad abruptly changed to one for female hygiene products.

Annoyed, I looked away, then caught sight of something that made me stop in my tracks. Two students from my school were in a skypark halfway to Junco Tower, and they were smoking cigarettes. I couldn’t make out their faces, but I recognized the distinct teal of the girl’s sailor suit. Our school was strict about smoking; getting caught usually led to expulsion. Who would have the guts, or stupidity, to smoke in public, and in uniform?

Before I could think of likely candidates, they put out their cigarettes and left the park, returning to the main skywalk via the single narrow one attached to the park. Now I recognized them. It was Arisa, the infamously pretty-but-weird president of the Noh club, and Hirota, who was in my own homeroom, though we’d never talked much. He was also in the Noh club. Huh.

To avoid running into them, I slipped around the salarymen to enter the skypark they had just vacated. It was tiny and unremarkable with a few vending machines, a smoker’s corner with a large ashtray, a few benches and trees, and a flowerbed. One of the vending machines was for cigarettes. A sudden, reckless urge struck me. I wanted to smoke too. I wasn’t the meek goody two-shoes my mom was trying to mold me into. I could break the law and smoke cigarettes like a delinquent. I’d even do it by myself, for my own satisfaction, not due to peer pressure.

After glancing back to make sure no one was heading my way, I fished out a five-hundred-yen coin and put it into the coin slot. I was glad for Japan’s obstinate liking for hard currency; mom routinely checked the contents of my card statements, and the cigarettes were sure to have been labelled as such.

I picked a brand at random and pushed the button.

Nothing happened.

I pushed the button again.

Clink. A single coin fell to the change tray, and the tiny screen next to the coin slot flashed. Purchase denied — purchaser underage. After a moment, the message disappeared, replaced by an advertisement for anti-breakout facial cleanser, a smiling school girl patting her clear face.

Annoyed, I took the coin from the slot. There must’ve been a camera I hadn’t noticed with some age estimation algorithm. I supposed the Noh club members had gotten someone else to buy their cigarettes for them, or gone to a convenience store—did convenience store workers check age? Well, I couldn’t try it now, at any rate, since I was in my uniform.

Nevertheless, even the attempt had been exciting. It was a tiny, tiny rebellion that I’d be able to remember when my mom got on my nerves.

I resumed my walk, stopping at a bookstore to browse for a bit, then arrived home at dinner time. Tadaima, I called out as I slipped off my black loafers. I’m home.

The okaeri I had expected to hear shouted in response never came. Through a doorway, I glimpsed my dad in the living room, on the couch with his tie loosened and his sleeves rolled up. He said nothing but gave me an odd, hard-to-interpret smile. In retrospect, I think it was meant as encouragement.

The next moment, my mom appeared before me, like a blonde storm cloud wielding a soup ladle, clutched so tight her knuckles were white. “Exactly what do you think you’ve been up to?”

Confused, I glanced at my watch, confirming it really was just eight o’clock. “I… went to Book-Off after cram school and read some manga. Were we supposed to eat early today? If so, I missed that—sorry.”

Mom inhaled sharply. “No, I mean the cigarettes.” She pronounced the word as if she was detonating a bomb in the hallway.

My jaw dropped. “How… how did you know?”

“So you did try to buy cigarettes. Marie, why would you…”

I interrupted. “Really, how did you know?”

She looked annoyed at the interruption, then took out her phone, swiping a couple of times and then holding out the screen to me.

This is an automated message to inform you that Tanimura Marie attempted to buy a pack of Mevius Light at Skypark 714 at 19:12 this evening. The identification certainty level is 97.6% and based on facial recognition confirmed for feasibility with Tanimura’s latest location records.

I stared at the message, incredulous. “That… that is such a violation of privacy!” I stuttered finally. “Is that even legal?”

“Marie,” mom hissed, “you are the one who tried to break the law! And you’re underage—it’s perfectly normal that we were informed. Now, the bigger question is, why would you do such a stupid thing? Who put you up to this?”

“No one,” I said, keeping my voice steady. “I just felt like it.” Normally, my mother’s anger would’ve immediately reduced me to contrite apologies, but now I was too shocked, and too angry myself, to be cowed. I wasn’t angry with her, though, but with the vending machine, with that surveillance system that had sold me out. I felt violated, as if discovering I had been watched while undressing.

“That’s hardly likely, now, is it? Out with it. Was it one of the girls in your homeroom? I could see Rie having some harebrained idea like this. Or did someone bully you into it?”

 “I said, no one.” Losing my patience, I raised my voice. “And I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” I swept past her and into my room, slamming the door behind me, surprised at my own courage in the face of my mom’s anger.

“Marie, we’re not done talking,” she yelled through the door. She began to turn the doorknob, but before she had opened the door, my dad’s calm voice sounded from further away. “Leave her be for now, Hanna. Now’s not the time.”

Mom didn’t say a word about the cigarettes at breakfast the next morning—nor anything else, for that matter. Either dad had persuaded her to cut me some slack, or she was brooding over what new, draconian rules to impose as punishment.

My resolve had hardened, though. At lunch break that day, I headed upstairs to where the gym and club rooms were located. I walked down the corridor outside the club rooms, reading the lettered signs on each door. Baseball club. Judo club. Karuta club.

Noh club.

I knocked on the door before I had a chance to get anxious and change my mind. After a moment, someone called out, “Come in.”

I opened the door and almost jumped. A hundred faces were staring at me. Then I saw they were masks: countless Noh masks of men, women, and demons, mounted all over the walls. There were only four human faces. Hirota sat by a small table, a convenience-store lunch spread out in front of him, and on the floor sat Arisa, plus a boy sipping chocolate milk and a girl with a scarf wrapped around her neck.

“Yes?” scarf girl said.

“Sorry to disturb you guys,” I said. “I was just wondering… Wait.” I pushed the door shut behind me, then looked at Arisa and Hirota in turn. “I saw you guys smoking cigarettes in a park yesterday.”

The three sitting on the floor exchanged a glance. Hirota had been about to take a bite from a custard bread, but froze.

“And, I wanted to know how you went about buying them,” I continued.

“Why?” Hirota asked, frowning.

“Because I want to buy cigarettes, too.”

Hirota had resumed eating. “You want to buy cigarettes?” he asked between mouthfuls of bread.

I nodded. “I tried to yesterday evening, from a vending machine in that park, but it didn’t work, and apparently, it sent an alert to my parents, so I got totally chewed out. I hadn’t known it could do that. So now I really want to buy cigarettes.” I laughed.

The three on the floor exchanged glances again, then Arisa looked at me, a little too long and a little too intensely.

Scarf girl piped up. “Sorry, but we can’t help you. You’ll have to figure it out on your own.”

Before I could decide on what to say, Arisa spoke. “I don’t see why we shouldn’t tell her.”

Scarf girl and chocolate milk boy protested indignantly. “But Arisa, she isn’t even…”, “Prez, we don’t know if we can trust her…”

What was this big secret to buying cigarettes? They were acting like it was some sort of arcane, privileged information, so clearly, they hadn’t just asked someone’s big sister to do it.

I waited while a staring contest continued between the three club members on the floor, as if they were attempting a telepathic debate about the merits of telling me.

 “You don’t have to tell me, of course,” I said, finally. “Thanks anyways.” I opened the door, then glanced at the walls again. “Also, your masks are really cool.”

The next few days, I couldn’t stop thinking about the vending machine that had sold me out, about what the great cigarette-buying secret might be, and about the Noh club. I was no longer thinking about what club to join; the Noh club was the only one that intrigued me now, but I hadn’t gotten the impression they were looking for new members.

The following Tuesday, my cram school class got rescheduled to the last slot of the evening. It was past ten and dark above the skywalks when I finally headed home, and the bars I passed in Junco Tower were lively with businesspeople from the nearby office floors.

At a corner after the last izakaya on the floor, I saw Arisa.

She was dressed in jeans, a hoodie, and a baseball cap, a large shopping bag slung over her shoulder. She was looking down at her phone, and I was debating whether to stop and say hi when she suddenly put it away, turned, and disappeared into a door that I had never noticed before.

Without thinking, I followed her.

The door led to a stairwell. Arisa climbed the stairs, exiting again two floors up. I kept my distance and exited a few moments after her. I emerged into a floor of offices, empty and dimly lit; only the corridors had the lights on, while the offices were pitch black. I looked around for Arisa, then heard a rustling sound from around a corner.

I padded quietly in the direction of the sound and spotted her again, now standing in front of a large door in glass and stainless steel; it must’ve been the entrance to some swanky corporation. She rummaged through the shopping bag, then pulled out something I couldn’t identify, a shapeless mass of beige and gray and pink. Then, she removed her baseball cap and pulled the thing over her head.

I gasped.

Arisa’s face was now that of a man in his fifties. The shapeless thing had been a mask. Not a stylized Noh mask or one of those jokey rubber masks caricaturing famous people, but an incredibly lifelike one; it looked as if the head of a man had been transplanted onto the body of a teenage girl. The effect was so uncanny, I felt like I was going to be sick.

Arisa tilted her neck backwards, looking up. I followed her gaze—or the gaze of the middle-aged man, rather—and noticed a camera mounted above the door. Then she lowered her head and stepped forward.

Nothing happened.

She waved a hand, as if to activate a motion sensor, then mumbled something I couldn’t make out. She stepped back, tugged at the mask, and looked up at the camera again. Then she stepped forward once more, and again, nothing happened. Now, she cursed audibly.

I was watching this, fascinated, when I heard a noise from the other side. A security guard had just entered the floor: a gray-haired man wielding a flashlight, probably a part-time retiree on his standard patrol route.

I looked back at Arisa. She didn’t seem to have noticed. I wasn’t sure what she was up to, but I suspected she wouldn’t want to get caught doing it. I dashed out from my hiding place.

“There’s a security guard just around the corner,” I hissed at her. “Take off the mask.”

She stood frozen for a moment, then removed the mask. The middle-aged man’s face seemed to crumple and collapse, and had I not been so nervous and high on adrenaline, I would’ve felt nauseated again. Then her own face was revealed, and she had just stuffed the mask back into the shopping bag when the guard turned the corner and saw us.

“Ora! What are you misses doing here?” he asked, walking up to us. “Everything on this floor is closed for the night, you know.”

“We were going to surprise her dad with an evening snack delivery to the office,” I said, letting my gaze flicker to the big paper shopping bag Arisa was holding. “But it turns out he’d already finished for the night.” I laughed as if this was a big joke.

“Aw, that’s sweet of you girls.” Then his tone turned mock-gruff. “But you ought to be in bed at this time. There; off you go.”

He shooed us away and I acquiesced, grabbing Arisa by the elbow and steering her towards the door to the stairwell. She didn’t say a word until we emerged among the bars and crowds two floors down. “Let’s go over there,” she said, nodding toward a skypark.

It was empty save for a salaryman tapping away on a smartphone in a corner, oblivious to the world. We headed for the opposite corner.

Arisa turned to me. “Thanks for that. It would’ve been bad if I’d gotten caught.” She didn’t ask why I had been there.

I nodded.

“I should’ve paid more attention myself, but I was so frustrated that the damn thing wouldn’t work.” She plopped down on a bench and rummaged in the shopping bag. Eventually she fished out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. “Do you want one?” she asked suddenly.

“No, thank you,” I said automatically. “But… what were you doing back there with that terrifyingly real middle-aged dudeface? And where did you get that?”

Arisa looked pleased. “I made it. It’s modelled after an employee there. I was testing it to see if it was good enough to fool those ID cameras and unlock the door. The answer is no, unfortunately.”

“But… what is that place, and why do you want to get in there?”

“It’s just some real estate company, and I don’t.” She lit her cigarette. “But their facial recognition algorithm is really good, and making a mask that can fool it would be a big achievement.”

“Don’t all the ID cameras work the same way?”

“No, no, not at all!” She stood up and waved her cigarette, excited. “There’s a whole range. Like, some really old beer and cigarette vending machines are so shitty you can literally take an eyeliner and draw lines on your face in a certain pattern, like wrinkles, and it’ll trick them into thinking you’re an adult. And on the other extreme, some corporations have ones that are practically like retinal scans. That place,” she nodded toward Junco Tower, “is fairly advanced. We use it for testing purposes. So far, none of us have succeeded in making a mask that’s good enough, though. Except granny, of course.”

Granny? I had so many new questions, I barely knew where to start. “Who’s ‘we’?” I finally decided on the question that was bothering me the most.

“Why, The Noh club, of course.” She smiled. “The name is a bit misleading. It’s more like the Noh-and-privacy-protection club. Most of us are privacy rights activists. Ogura is the only one who’s hardcore Noh-only. Do you want to join?”

Noh and privacy protection. I hadn’t expected that. “Privacy rights activist” had a punky, rebellious ring to it, but Noh was ultra-high culture. “That is so cool,” I said, then it hit me that she had asked if I wanted to join. “But… I don’t know anything about Noh. Or about privacy.”

“You can learn.”

My phone vibrated audibly, and I recalled how late it was. “I have to go; that’s probably my mom, wondering why I’m not home yet.”

Arisa nodded, then stubbed out her cigarette. “If you’re interested,” she said, “I’ll show you the workshop after school tomorrow.”

“Good evening, sensei,” Hirota and Nanami—that was scarf girl’s name—called out as we emerged from a staircase into the workshop. The workshop covered most of the second floor of Arisa’s house. Yes—a house, like in the remotest of suburbs, except this one was squeezed in between Junco Tower and another high-rise; they must’ve been under siege with developers and yakuza wanting to buy the plot.

The workshop was divided in two. Half had tatami mats and antique furniture and Noh masks covering the walls. It was in this half that sensei, an old woman, sat working by a low table. The other half had laminate flooring and furniture in bright white, lifelike latex masks mounted on stands.

Hirota plopped down on the tatami floor, relaxing, while Nanami beelined for a worktable on the other side. Arisa knelt down next to the old woman, motioning for me to follow. The woman was working on a Noh mask, carving the corners of its eyes with a fine scalpel.

“Granny, this is Marie. Marie, this is my grandma. She’s a Noh mask artisan. And she pioneered the latex painting techniques we use for the other masks.”

The woman looked up from her work. “Are you a new member?” Before I could answer, she continued, “Our family has been Noh mask carvers for four generations. Arisa here will be next; her father didn’t have any talent for mask-carving.” She put down her scalpel to pat Arisa on the shoulder.

“Arisa’s parents are both big digital rights activists,” Hirota said, leaning back on his elbows. “Like, super big. That’s another of the reasons we hang out here: my parents would be totally freaking out that we were doing something illegal.”

“Is this illegal?” I asked, nervously.

Arisa’s granny chuckled, then returned her attention to the mask.

“Depends,” Arisa said, getting up. I followed her to the modern side of the workshop, where Nanami had gotten to work on a lifelike mask, a superfine brush in her hand. The mask depicted an older Western woman, but it was nowhere near as realistic as the one Arisa had worn the day before.

Arisa looked over Nanami’s shoulder as she spoke. “There’s nothing illegal about making a mask. It is sometimes—but not always—illegal to use a mask to trick a facial recognition algorithm. Let’s say now that you’re impersonating a specific person and entering a place using their face as credentials. If you don’t actually enter the place, it’s a bit more of a gray zone. And if you’re not impersonating a specific person but just happen to like wearing masks that make you look like a different gender, or perhaps thirty years older, that’s usually—but not always—legal.”

I nodded, watching Nanami make the tiniest brush strokes along the nostrils of the mask. Then she paused, resting her wrist against the table. I wanted her to know I didn’t hold any grudges for her refusal to share the big cigarette secret with me a few days earlier, so I asked politely, “Nanami-san, what’s the reason you decided to join the Noh club?”

She turned to me. “Because of Arisa. And because I don’t like personalized advertising. I had never really thought about it much, but after Arisa told me how face-based advertising worked, it really upset me. Like, we go about our lives boxed in by our own faces, constantly having the world tell us who we’re supposed to be, where we can go and what we should buy and do and watch. I hate it.” She paused, looking down at the mask. “So it feels good to use another face once in a while. And I like the artistic aspects of mask-making, too, though my own masks are still not very good.”

That was exactly it, I thought, as Nanami resumed her painting. I didn’t want to be told who I was supposed to be any more either.

So I joined the Noh club, and I couldn’t say what I loved the most: learning about privacy laws with Arisa’s parents and our adrenaline-fueled outings to test masks in the night-time, or our monthly outings to the National Noh Theater, where the actors transformed into demons or courtiers with the help of finely carved, stylized masks, like those made by Arisa’s grandmother.

At the dinner table at home, I gushed about how Noh masks can appear to change expression based on the angle of the light or the stage presence of Noh actors I had seen. Mom was both out of her depth and fundamentally in awe of anything “traditionally Japanese,” so she never pried, and the Noh club became my sphere of freedom.

A few weeks before the end of the school year, I completed my first realistic mask, and Arisa and Hirota joined me late in the evening at Skypark 714 to try it out. They kept a lookout over the skywalk adjoining the park, and once they had assured me that the coast was clear, I pulled the mask out of my bag. It depicted an elegant older woman; I had modelled it on the old folk singer Misora Hibari in full stage makeup.

I tugged it over my head, then approached the cigarette vending machine warily. It was the same one where I had obliviously tried to buy cigarettes almost a year earlier. Rather than the glamorous Hibari, it would’ve been more fitting had I worn a Noh mask of the vengeful samurai Soga Tokimune.

I put a five-hundred-yen coin into the coin slot, then hesitated over what to pick.

“Get the regular Mevius,” Hirota shouted. “If you don’t like them, I’ll take them.”

I pushed the button for a pack of Mevius, then tilted my head to look directly into where I now knew the facial recognition camera was mounted. We waited in expectant silence.

Thump.

I bent down to fish out a pack of cigarettes from the slot and held it out toward Arisa and Hirota. “Look,” I said, as amazed and proud as a new parent. “It worked!”

“Good,” Arisa said, giving one of her rare smiles, while Hirota let out a whoop and pumped his fist in the air. “Well done, Marie!”

We bought ourselves cans of hot coffee from another of the vending machines and sat down. I unwrapped the pack of cigarettes reverently and extracted one. I had never held a cigarette before.

Arisa handed me a lighter, and I attempted to light the cigarette without much success.

Hirota laughed. “You have to inhale while you light it, you know.”

“Oh,” I said sheepishly. I succeeded on the next attempt and inhaled deeply, then began to cough. It tasted disgusting, and I felt weirdly nauseated. Hirota laughed again, while Arisa moved closer to pat me on the back. Once I stopped coughing, I got up and put the cigarette out in the ashtray. Then, I handed Hirota the pack. “Well, that was a lot of trouble for something I will never do again. Gross!” Arisa and Hirota both laughed this time. I sat down to sip my coffee, and despite the exhaust-fume taste in my mouth, I felt happy and free.

Those stripes brought me here. They kept me here for months. And now they are about to make me famous.

I pluck my phone from the console and check the signal. One bar. I might get lucky. I touch redial and listen, tongue on the roof of my mouth, for any sign of a connection. Ahead, the road twists right, then left, around turns blind even in broad daylight. It’s nearly midnight now, with the moon a sliver that does little to aid navigation. I want to press harder on the gas. Instead, I tap the steering wheel with one broken, dirty nail.

“Come on, come on,” I mutter at the phone. After a minute, I glance at the screen again. No signal.

“Damnit.” I thumb the screen to sleep and drop it in the console, then shift my attention back to the road.

The gleam of eyes in my high beams throws my heart into overdrive. I slam the brakes, and the dark woods spin around me until the stag is racing toward my door instead of my bumper. My hands drag the wheel toward him just as he leaps to fly into the right side of the windshield. The impact rolls his body until his flank presses through the demolished glass, half passenger, half hood ornament.

Tires skid, rubber squealing, then crunching gravel and low brush on the downhill slope as I leave the road.The ground drops into a steep bank and the car tilts, two wheels in the air before it rolls, leaving the stag behind. Airbags before and beside me explode, thickening the air with the smell of burnt rubber. Rocks, shrubs, and trees somersault on the other side of the blood-spattered windshield. I bounce in my seatbelt, arms flopping and head joggling to some macabre beat I cannot hear.

The car slams into something—a tree? a boulder?—at the edge of the precipice, that loud metallic crunch echoing as my head whips to one side. The sudden stillness, broken only by the falling of loosened debris and the distant bawling of the injured stag, reaches numbing fingers to drag me into its depths as the woods around me fade to black.

I wake to bright agony, the reek of gasoline, and whispered voices. Someone found me?

“Help!” I whimper and turn my head in excruciating increments to see who has come to my rescue. The slope above me shines pale, brighter in the waning moon’s light, which gleams on the silvered fur of animals gathered there, staring at my predicament. Humans stand among them with long mussed hair, willowy forms, wide eyes… and wings.

I blink, rub my face, which burns with gritty powder. When I look again, the animals and winged people are gone. Trees above the slope stretch shadows down the scrubby incline as if to push or pull my wrecked car from the ledge.

What’s left of the windshield sags toward me like a hammock, its surface spider-webbed and perforated. Glass pebbles lay scattered over me, the seats, the floors, the dash, even the ground around the car, their surfaces winking with moonlight. They look as cold as I feel. I reach for my phone. Its usual cubby sits empty save for the glass. My lifeline is unreachable, lost inside the vehicle or lying somewhere between me and the road that I left so unexpectedly moments—or was it hours?—ago.

I push the button on my seatbelt. The catch ignores my fingers, snugs me tight against the seat cushion. I press harder, struggle, and the car shifts, groaning against the rock.

The drop before me wobbles. I freeze. A chill beyond the night air pumps gooseflesh up my neck, down my arms, across my chest.

Movement on the dark slope draws my attention, head and neck throbbing in protest. Halfway up the hill, a figure makes its way toward me. Another motorist saw the deer, maybe. I close my eyes and breathe a sigh. Help, at last.

“Oh, thank god.” The sound of my own voice is like a knife in my head. “Did you phone for help?”

My rescuer continues down the slope in silence until she nears my car. Thick white hair falls over her shoulders, casting darkness across her eyes. Her cheeks are shriveled like a plum left out too long. Her nose and chin protrude into the moonlight, her puckered mouth lagging in the valley between them. The woman’s shoulders hunch forward, rounding her back with the weight of years. One gnarled hand holds a long, knobbed staff, a useful tool on this uneven ground. Dark clothes hide the details of her body.

Outside my window she pauses, takes in the scene. Looks my car—and me—over from end to end, inside and out. She sucks her teeth. Shakes her head. Puts her free hand on one hip.

“Got yourself in a pickle, I think,” she croaks.

The throbbing in my head muddles my thoughts. “Yeah. Can you help me out here? My seatbelt’s stuck. I need a knife or scissors.”

She stares a moment longer, her eyes still obscured.

Her inspection triggers an itch deep in my chest, beyond the reach of fingers that might dispel it. But something else stirs beneath the itch, an unnerving sensation, as if she is reading my soul. Head trauma can cause all sorts of hallucinations.

Soft footfalls whisper outside my door, and I look up just as the old woman grasps the handle.

“Careful,” I warn. “My balance is off.”

“More than you know,” she says. She opens the door while muttering something beneath her breath, reaches across me, and releases the belt with a light touch. The strap zips back into its sheath, and she takes my hand. “Out with you.”

I try to be gentle. She looks as aged as the woods around us. But the power in her hand and arm, strong as the rocks beneath our feet, catches me off-guard. She pulls me upright as if I were a toddler.

“Thank you,” I say. “You don’t know how glad I am to see you. I’m Caitlin.”

“I know who you are.”

Her nose points toward me, but I still can’t see her eyes. I frown. Maybe she found my wallet on the ground? I didn’t look for it in the car. I peer down at her hunched form as it moves back toward the wood.

“Come.”

Strange how I hear her command so clearly, even though she did not raise her voice from a near-whisper. I glance back at my totaled SUV, teetering there on the edge of a precipice so deep-set in darkness I cannot see the bottom. I shudder and scurry uphill toward my savior. Aches erupt down my back, as they have in my neck. Twice, I almost fall.

“Do you have a car on the road?” I call. “A phone, maybe?” Probably not at her age. “What’s your name?”

Her silence makes me wonder if she’s heard me, so I shout my questions again. The effort makes my teeth throb.

“You’ve already roused the forest,” she says without looking at me. “No need to wake the dead, too.”

“But I—”

“Shh.” She nears the tree line, her steady pace devouring the rugged terrain like she could do it in her sleep.

A soft peripheral glow draws my eye. Only shadows meet my gaze. Another, ahead, pulls my attention back to our path. Again, there is nothing to see but leafy boles and the last of the moonlight as it slips behind the crags above the treetops.

We follow the path of destruction wrought by my crash. The canopy’s cover mostly shades our passage. I hurry to keep up with the woman’s form, even though a blind person could find their way back in this trail of vegetative carnage. I look around at the gouged terrain, gaps in the kudzu, saplings splintered or ripped from their foundations, and shake my head. How I avoided every mature tree, how I managed to ram against the one boulder at the edge of the crag, how I remain upright and breathing are puzzles I cannot solve. Any landing you can walk away from, as they say.

Ahead, a snuffling grunt accompanies feeble tremors to one side of the trail. The old woman slogs through uprooted shrubbery and broken branches toward the sound. I follow until I see the catalyst of this near disaster.

The stag lies on its side, blood visible along its flank, belly, and face, even in this light. The angle of its head belies the rapid, trembling breaths that still flutter in its chest. It should already be dead. It will be. Soon.

Ah, hell.

My lungs heave for both myself and this innocent bystander. Stupid mistake. I should have been going slower. I should have waited to call Jonah. I should have been watching the road. My knees tremble. My chest shakes. I clap a hand over my mouth. This wasn’t part of the plan.

It hurts to move and I mutter a curse. Climbing and digging will be difficult for a while. Healing, not to mention finding a new SUV and tools, will slow me down. Such a nuisance, this interruption. Innocent or not, if it weren’t for this deer, I’d already be in town, having a beer with Jonah and telling him about my find.

The old woman reaches the stag’s side. I stumble closer.

She squats, lithe as a teenager, touches her hand to its head, mumbles words in a soothing tone I can’t quite place, and the animal quiets. Settles. Its last breath frosts the air around its head, and the woman stays there long after, her lips moving in a litany I cannot hear. At last, she strokes the beast’s head one last time, pulls herself upright, and looks at me.

“Such a shame,” I say. “He was a beautiful stag.”

She stares, expectant. Her hair gleams in the dark.

“What?” I point at the animal. “I didn’t mean to kill it. He was just there, on the road. It was an accident.”

She watches. Says nothing.

“Surely you don’t think this is my fault. If anyone’s to blame here, it’s the stag. He almost killed me.”

The woman shakes her head, a subtle motion in the surrounding darkness. Again, a glow appears off to one side but is gone when I look that way.

“He volunteered,” the woman murmurs.

My attention swings back to her face. “What did you say?”

“I am Baba.” She steps into the trees, gestures for me to follow. “You should see.”

“What about the road?” I can’t seem to help the whine in my voice. Every muscle in my body burns. I touch my face and find crusted blood there. “I need medical attention.”

Baba stops just inside the wood amid a subtle glow, as if dozens of fireflies surround her. One hand on her staff, she watches me. Waits in stillness.

“I appreciate you helping me, Baba, but I need to get out of here.” I wave toward the road. “I think I’ll try to flag down another driver.”

She tilts her head, a slight cant to the white glow of her hair. “Suit yourself.”

I turn toward the road…

… and awaken still belted in my car.

I blink. Frown. Look around as if I have awakened to a dream. This can’t be right, can it?

No. No, I was out. I was, if not safe, at least not wedged against a boulder on this escarpment, teetering at the precipice of my new life. How did I—

I pinch myself. Hard.

Nothing changes, except that the sky seems lighter now. Stars have faded. Without my phone, I don’t even know what time it is.

I look outside at the ground next to my car. No footprints mar the dewy sparkle there. My head falls back against the seat’s restraint. Baba was a dream?

Whispers, soft as a sigh, tickle my ears like a blade of grass drawn along the skin and I start, jerking my head to the side harder than I’d intended. Pain slices into my head and stabs down my neck into my shoulders. I suck a breath through gritted teeth and wait for it to pass. When my vision clears, I see no one, but I feel them.

“Hello?”

The whispers fall silent. Even early birdsong and morning crickets break off. Morning mist lends an otherworldly haze to the setting.

Then, between one blink and the next, I am back in the path wrought by my car’s passage. Baba waits among the trees while I stand calf-deep in a gouge ripped into the ground, neither of us moved so far as a pace.

“Changed your mind, did you?” She sucks her teeth, a glimmer of light twinkling where I imagine her eyes to be.

“What—” I frown and point at my surroundings as I gape and stutter. “How did—”

Baba plucks a weed, chews it a moment before she moves on. Her footfalls make no sound among the clutter of leaves and twigs, as if she levitates. Her passage sets the sparse weeds swaying and soon she is almost out of sight.

“Are you coming?” Her voice is a whisper carried on an invisible breeze.

Like the murmurs I heard in my car. I was back there. I was. And now I am here. How does that even—

“Don’t dawdle,” she calls back. 

I jog to catch up, stumbling over the clutter, my ankles twisting in their own discomfort. Here, beneath the trees, fluctuating patches of shade and pale light dance and shift across bole, ground, and rock. I stop at one particular stone, the size of my fist, with spangles that gleam like burnt amber in a sunbeam.

I’d know it anywhere, now. Metathracite. Or that’s the name I’ve used. I hope it will serve as a foundation in medical cures for something like cancer one day—the tests I ran in camp indicated its enormous potential—but if it finds a worthwhile home in the tech arena, that will serve just as well for my purposes. My name and career ride on the bet that this is a heretofore unknown mineral, that I am in fact its discoverer, and that its unexpected and unique properties will ensconce my find in a position of high demand. I pick it up.

“Nice rock,” Baba says from beside me.

Startled, I leap almost a foot downhill. I stumble into a tree, one hand pulled back to lob the metathracite in defense. I whoosh a loud, long breath. “Baba, don’t do that. I could have hurt you without meaning to.”

“Could you now?” She squints at me, then nods at the rock. “That ain’t worth what you’ll pay.”

“What does that mean?” My head throbs and I squeeze the back of my neck with my free hand.

She steps away, beckons.

I follow, hefting the stone, valuing it in my mind. If it’s as unique as I suspect, metathracite might even revolutionize entire industries. My mind wanders along that pleasant dream as I traipse after Baba, our steps carrying us farther from my vehicle until I’m no longer certain I could find it again. Maybe she’s taking me to her own car? No. That makes no sense. The road lay closer than this, and the path to that destination needed no breadcrumbs up the hillside. Not after my passage.

Maybe Baba lives nearby and heard the crash?

I glance around. This wood seems best fit for animals and trees and birds. What kind of house might Baba have here, so far from the city’s civilized services? My most primitive campsites may not have running water, but they at least have satellite.

Usually.

The tightness in my shoulders and back make continued movement a chore. I should have swallowed a few aspirin before I left my car. Assuming I could find them in the wreckage. “Where are we going?” I call.

She stops a few yards ahead, in the liminal space between light and dark. I make my way to her side.

Baba points to a carpet of blue threaded between and around the gnarled roots of nearby trees as far as I can see. Sun sparkles in dewdrops on tiny velvet caps where the light breaks through the canopy. In the shade, spidery veins of turquoise glow across the mass fungal growth, peering out from within like lights behind curtained windows.

“Spritefoot,” she says. “Catena civitatis. Guter nachbar. Ffrind y coedwr. No matter its name. As essential to this wood as neurons are to your brain. Watch your step.” She leads me on a narrow path between the vivid beds.

I look behind, where our feet have passed, and catch a glimmer of light as it dissipates behind a tree. Just like the others. What is that? I stop, go back, swing around the tree into a cloud of Lilliputian rainbows, wings aflutter all at once, patches of morning sun reflecting their iridescence. The diminutive buzz of one pair multiplied by dozens, hundreds, hums loud as a swarm of hornets. I gasp, then close my mouth, hopeful I’ve not swallowed one of these creatures.

“Ostanovis’, ty uzhe poveselilsya.” Baba speaks from beside me. She waves at the insects, her tone indulgent, even amused. “Begone. We’ve work to do.”

The tiny wings scatter and Baba resumes our trek. “They’ll be back. Curious creatures.”

I hurry to catch up. “What are they?”

“Fae.”

Images of childhood fancy dance through my mind, complete with enchanted forests where time passed differently than in the human world and where winged beings made their home. “Fae? Like faeries? That kind of fae?”

She tosses me a glance past the white hair on her shoulders, the kind of look my grandmother used to keep wee me silent in the midst of company when I rambled too long. I am no longer small, and I open my mouth to say more, but think better and shut it once again. Baba is my exit plan, though I’m starting to think I would have been better off hiking to the road and hitching back to town.

“You tried that,” Baba calls back. “Didn’t work like you expected, did it?”

I stop dead, my shoulders pulled up tight toward my ears like someone poured ice water down my back. She heard my thoughts?

Ahead, she reaches up into the lower branches of a tree, murmuring words I can’t make out. Her hand comes back down slowly, slowly, and she approaches me, still speaking to something on her palm. When she’s close, I see her little friend.

Little: not the right word in this case. The spider Baba holds is larger than her hand.

If I wasn’t frozen already, this would be the catalyst. I stare at the enormous thing, its body and all eight legs covered in fine, glistening hairs that sway in a breeze I don’t feel. Peacock blue cephalothorax and green abdomen stand out in the verdant gloom of the wood, their luminous color capturing light like insects in its web. Red leg joints make every movement look deadly, and its black eyes shine out at me as if I am a juicy offering at its altar.

I back up a step, and Baba stops. “Lady of the wood,” she says. “Nothing to fear. Say hello.”

I nod, babble some inane greeting to the spider, but keep my distance.

Baba pulls the Lady closer to her face. “Sometimes, if I ask nicely, she donates drops of venom to dry infections. Her silk then seals the wound. She and her sisters eat those pests who would carry disease to me or the other mammals in the woods.”

The spider crawls up Baba’s arm. If it gets tangled in the crone’s hair, I’ll have to help her get it out and I can’t do it, I can’t—

Baba coos to the spider and takes it back to its perch, then continues in her original direction. I follow, veering off the side to pass far from the Lady’s nest while keeping Baba in sight. She treads no discernible path. If I lose her, I will never find my way out.

The silence of this place presses against my ears, my chest. I hug myself as I walk. This is all wrong. If not for my eagerness, if not for that deer, I would be in the city. Jonah and I would be having coffee, or maybe breakfast, at that cable car diner he loves so much. Has he missed me yet? Probably not. Wouldn’t be the first time I’d gone off-grid for weeks. When last I saw him, he tried to give me a job in his department, as if I could ever take root in one spot instead of seeking my fortune out here, under the sky and on the land.

Baba stops. Light falling through the canopy still shows me nothing of her eyes beneath the crown of her hair.

She tilts her head. “Look around.”

I blink. Frown. “I don’t—”

Baba gestures with her chin, left and right. “What do you see?”

Past the wooded shade, a patch of green glows in bright sunlight. Tall spikes of blue flowers bow and waggle with the weight of butterflies and bees that flit between blossoms. A hummingbird, all gleaming iridescence, zips in from the side, spearing flowers one after another.

Above us, crown-shy trees mark fractals against the morning sky, their boughs moving in unison. A small red-and-black bird climbs one bole, moving in jerks and stops, probing the bark before its face with a sharp, long bill. A rustling sound to my right pulls my attention. There, a wild sow shuffles through the undergrowth, her snout scouting the ground before her feet. Behind her, grunting, follow five small piglets, their dark fur spotted and blobbed with random white. They take no notice of us and are gone so quickly I could almost forget they were ever there.

Baba waits, still and quiet.

“Trees,” I say. “Birds. Bees. Flowers. Pigs. Bushes.” I shake my head. What does she want from me?

“There’s your problem. You see the bricks, but not the house.” She gestures. “Those flowers grow only in these forests. They are the only source of food for that hummingbird. The spritefoot and the wood lady who frightened you so are connected. Without the fungus, the spider couldn’t survive. Without the spider, the spritefoot would not grow. The sow and her offspring eat a mushroom native to these mountains. If they did not, the fungi would invade the forest floor, crowd out other native species.” She resumes our journey and speaks over her shoulder, her voice accompanied by the occasional thump of her walking stick on root or stone. “Not just trees. Not just flowers. Not just pigs. Together, they make the Forest. If you pull at even one thread of that tapestry, you damage the whole.”

I follow her footsteps, but her words make no sense.

“Your plan will kill it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We have been watching you. I know what you intend.”

Aw hell! Just my luck to be rescued by an aged greenie, living off-grid in the woods. Yes, she pulled me from my car. Yes, she appeared to be leading me to safety. But she was also trying to stop me from pursuing a dream.

To hell with that.

“My plan will create medicines,” I say, unable to keep the snark silent. “My plan may even save millions of lives.”

“And what of the billions in this forest, and in its brethren all along these mountains?” She shakes her head, but her voice is as quiet now as it has been all along. “Your actions will trigger their fall and affect lands far from this spot. Is that not too high a price to pay?”

“It’s a patch of trees. It’ll grow back.”

She snorts, shakes her head. Mutters something I don’t catch.

“What?” I say. “We’ll only dig the minerals we need, then we’ll move on. Your precious forest will be fine.”

Baba stops so suddenly I almost collide with her hunched form. She peers at me. “You care nothing for the millions. You care only for the one.”

She moves forward again. I wish I had stayed in my car. I wish I had made my way to the road. I could be in town by now, clean and fed. It occurs to me how thirsty I am.

“You need tea.” Baba starts uphill, her aged body taking the incline better than my own.

I’m not surprised that she heard my thoughts. Hear this one, I think, with an imaginary rude gesture.

Baba laughs, a raspy cackle like the sound of ragged fingernails on sandpaper.

“Where are we going?” I cough, one hand to my mouth, then stare wide-eyed at the rosette of blood on my palm. What the—internal injuries? There is pain, yes, but…

“Almost there.”

Baba’s voice and a squawk ahead of us drags me back to the moment, to my surroundings, in time to see a raven swoop toward us. I duck, throw my arms over my head, and shield my face.

“Glupaya zhenshchina.” Baba’s voice reaches me as she moves forward. “Ne obrashchay na neye vnimaniya.”

I peek between my arms. The bird—enormous against Baba’s head—sits on the crone’s shoulder and eyes me as if I am some strange new prey. It chatters and croaks in a near growl while Baba walks on ahead.

“Almost there,” I say, “where?”

Baba points her staff up the hill.

There, a rickety house perches between two trees whose spreading bases and sprawling roots look like large chicken feet that grip the forest floor beneath the dwelling. Beside and behind its exterior walls, the trees rise like guardians, their leaves whispering in a breeze far above the ground.

“That’s where you live?” I say.

Instead of answering, she ascends the steep slope with ease on footholds only she can see. I clamber after her, finding traction where I can until we stand just before the structure. Beneath, branches stretch between the trees, their massive boughs woven together so long ago their flesh has melded one into the other. At the side, Baba climbs a stair that winds around the trunk. I follow, taking in every tiny detail. Each riser bears pads of soft green moss, thin in the center where Baba treads, plush at the sides out of the reach of foot traffic. There, in the thickness, delicate stalks support pale pink cup-shaped flowers so tiny I must stoop to see their forms. Moisture beads along the surface of these tiny worlds, and I wonder if creatures live therein.

As I start up the stair, a breeze wafts some heady fragrance past. I glance around. There, upslope from Baba’s home, a swath of blue flowers hang teardrop heads that nod and bob along curved stems, their leaves swaying like long blades of dark grass. I sniff the air.

“Deòir na baintighearna.” Baba’s voice distracts me. “Officially Dominae lacrimae, though no one gave them the honor of a formal name until they were thought extinct. Once, they covered the floor of these woods and those in similar landscapes. Now…” She sighs and looks over her domain. “They grow only here.”

I step up to the next riser and fall to my knees and Baba is there, her hand on my arm. She lifts me as if I were a child, as if I did not tower over her hunched form. I peer into her face. Shadows gather where her eyes should be.

“You are weak. You need tea.” She speaks to the raven who still rides her shoulder, and the bird is off, croaking a response in flight. It ascends into the shafts of morning sun breaking through the canopy, its wings blotting out the light, and I am falling. Baba says something in a tongue I don’t recognize. Then… nothing.

The world twists around me, all its facets bathed in hues of murky green. Noises and murmurs filter through the confusion. I squeeze my eyes tight, fight the nausea that rises in my throat and threatens to eject my last meager meal. My fists close around something soft. Something crisp. The green swirling slows, and the voices grow louder, crystallize. One stands out among the rest.

Jonah.

Jonah!

I push against the lethargy and struggle awake.

“Well, hello there.” Jonah’s voice sounds beside me.

His short hair is mussed, as if he were dragged from his bed at a wee hour. But he’s smiling, dimples in stubbled cheeks, thin lips surrounding bright white teeth. Concern deepens the brown of his eyes. Instead of his usual loosened tie and button-down shirt, he wears a wrinkled polo shirt, its logo old, unrecognizable.

Above and behind him hangs the white ceiling of a hospital, and it all comes rushing back. The stag. The woods. The slope. The boulder.

Baba. The fae. The watching animals. The delirium that followed the accident.

I roll my head on the pillow and rub my face, clean now of the burning powder from the airbags. My mentor leans on the bed rail, which creaks. I know his expression without looking—bushy brows pulled together in the center, dark gaze scrutinizing me through the lenses of his spectacles, critiquing my actions as if I am still the prized student who hasn’t quite achieved academic superiority.

I lick my lips.

“You are hereby on notice,” he says, “not to ever worry me like that again.”

“How bad?” I croak. I sound like Baba’s raven friend. The one I dreamed of.

“Well,” he pauses, “you will mend. Your car, however, is toast.”

“Yeah.” In a blink, the woods are rolling around me again. The metallic crunch of car versus boulder echoes in my head.

“Do I need to ask what you were doing up there?” The resignation in Jonah’s voice matches that in his expression.

“No. But—”

“Cait.” He shakes his head. “At least don’t go on these goose chases alone. You could have died.”

“A partner wouldn’t have stopped that buck from jumping in front of my car,” I say. “And then I would have been responsible for someone else being hurt.”

“Let me guess.” Jonah peers at me. “You were on your phone.”

“Trying to call you.” I look into his eyes. “I found it, Jonah.”

He pushes upright, runs fingers through his hair. He shoves his hands into his pockets and mutters something under his breath.

“I didn’t catch that.” No doubt, it wasn’t complimentary.

“We’ve had this conversation before,” Jonah says. “Though admittedly this is the first time we’ve had it in the ER. Don’t make me play it out solo in the morgue, Cait.”

Of course, he’s right. But he’s also wrong. “It’s different this time. I really found it.”

His stare holds mine, peering into me, searching for the truth in my demeanor, my words, my resolve. Well, maybe not that latter. I’ve always been resolved, even when chasing false leads. I like to think of it as my superpower.

“What makes this time different?” he asks, his voice tired.

“I found a mineral layer I’ve not seen before. Anywhere.” I don’t tell him I’d stumbled across it by accident when I fell into a shallow ravine and got stuck there for two days while the swelling in my ankle cleared enough to climb back out. “Took a lot of samples back to my campsite, ran chem baths, extractions, the works. At least as much as I could do in a rough lab.” I grin. “The powdered stone showed amazing properties. I believe it’s catalytic. Everything I added it to changed in unexpected ways.”

Jonah frowns. “Explain ‘unexpected.’”

“I’d rather show you.” I stop. “Wait, did they get my things from my car? All my samples were in my field case.”

“I don’t know. They managed to retrieve a few items, I think, but there wasn’t much left. Getting you out was dicey enough. They can’t get your car out yet. They need special equipment to reach it.”

Damn. My belongings must be flung out along the gouged terrain. In that mess, they may never find my field kit. I’d need another. “Oh well. We can go back for more. It looks plentiful in the gorge walls above the tree line in those mountains, and hints of more farther along the range. Now that I’ve found the markers, we can track it.”

Jonah shakes his head. “Cait, I don’t think I can convince the university to back you again. You’ve had too many false leads.”

I stare at him. This man has supported my endeavors without fail ever since pre-doctoral studies, when I took one of his undergrad classes. Okay, yes, I’ve followed a few trails that petered out, but this—

Metathracite is real. I knew it even before I found proof, and now the rest of the world will see, too. He has to believe me. I won’t accept anything less.

The machine beside me begins to beep with a will. Jonah glances at it, then at me, a frown on his face. I breathe deep, slow. The machine still beeps.

He pats my shoulder. “Calm down, Cait.”

“I’m perfectly calm,” I say. “But you need to listen to me. This isn’t like the other—”

Another machine joins the first, and the door sweeps open to admit two nurses and a doctor. Jonah backs away from the bed.

“Step outside, sir,” says the doc.

Jonah moves toward the door.

“No!” I shout. “Jonah, wait!”

“All right, Ms. Banks.” The doctor injects something into my IV line and smiles at me. “Let’s calm things down, shall we? You need your rest.”

I peer past the doc at Jonah, outside the closing door. “No! Jonah—”

The door clicks shut, blocking him from my view. Hospital sounds blur, fuzzing into the texture of my consciousness like moss on a tree root until I can’t tell reality from fantasy.

The doctor speaks to one of the nurses, her voice drawn out and inhuman. “She gets no visitors until…”

Lights dim, greying into twilight like the forest around Baba’s house. My body grows heavy, pushed down into the mattress as though it were weighted with stones.

I try to speak, to tell the doc that I need to tell Jonah… something… I can’t…

A pungent aroma awakens me. The lumpy bed beneath me and the dark, smoke-stained roof timbers above are not those of a hospital. I try to sit up. When that fails, I try to move my head. Nothing works like it should.

“Hello?” I call.

“Good. I wasn’t sure you were coming back.” Baba’s voice comes from my left, followed by a rasping sound.

“Baba?” Stupid. Who else would it be? Except… I was in the hospital. Jonah was there, and—

Baba appears above me, her figure silhouetted by the light behind her.

“Why am I back here?” I try again to sit up. “And why can’t I move?”

“You never left. I gave you a tincture to stop you hurting yourself.” She tilts her head. “Why this stone?”

I blink. “What?”

“The world is full of rocks and pebbles. Why must you destroy these forests to take ours?”

That again. “This mineral is special. It could help to make groundbreaking medicines. Maybe even cure cancer. But I haven’t found it anywhere outside these mountains.”

“Ah. So, you’ve searched the world over then?”

“Well, no. But I’ve done the research, read papers by geologists in every country. None have reported this mineral.”

She stares at me, or at least I think she does. It’s disconcerting to not see her eyes.

“Your work will kill this wood and others like it, wherever you crumble the mountainside.”

“It’s a few patches of trees, Baba. They’ll grow back.” If I could, I would shrug. “It isn’t like I’m hurting the entire planetary ecosystem or anything.”

She moves out of view. Something clatters, metal on metal. Then she returns and lifts my left foot to slide a thin tray beneath it, one with a trough at its edges. I feel nothing, but the image of my foot on a tray disturbs what remains of my calm.

“What are you doing?”

Baba disappears, then returns with a small bowl, the source of that smell that awoke me. She dips a cloth into the bowl, then swabs a sticky brown substance around my ankle and across the top of my foot.

“What are you doing?” My voice carries a shrill tone. The foreboding that began with a thin tray swells to outright concern.

Again, she moves out of sight. Another clattering sound and she’s back, balancing another tray on a stand beside my foot, close enough to see what it holds.

Knives. Scalpels. Saw. What the actual—

“Baba! What are you doing?”

She turns to me and finally, I see her eyes. I wish I hadn’t. Around the lids, her brown flesh is carved into wrinkles that stretch out to her hairline and down onto her cheeks. In the gap between the lids, deep green irises pierce my soul, their color so dark they appear almost black. No white field surrounds them. If I fall into that gaze, I’ll never crawl out again.

I manage to squeak.

“I’m going to take off your foot,” she explains, her voice calm, soft, as it has been all along.

“What?”

She holds up her instruments as if to examine their edges.

“Why?” I ask, my voice still small. “Is it damaged?”

“No.” She wipes the scalpel with the same cloth from her bowl. “But I can use the marrow from your bones in my tea.” She looks up. “Good for my aches.”

“What?” I shriek. “No, you can’t do that!” I struggle. Or, rather, I try.

Baba faces me. “Where’s the harm? It’s not like I’m hurting the rest of your body, right?” She goes back to cleaning and disinfecting her implements. “You can survive with one foot.”

I babble for a moment, scrambling to find words that will stop this horror from taking place. “Okay! Okay, Baba. You’ve given me a lot to think about. Can you wait and let me consider what you’ve said?”

Baba stops, staring at me like I’m a bug beneath a microscope. “I need that marrow.”

“I know,” I say, too fast. “Just let me think this over. Will you do that?” If I can delay her long enough for this… this tea or whatever to wear off, I can get out of here. I’ll find my way back to the road, somehow. And I’ll do it on two healthy, attached feet.

My insides squirm, as does my brain inside its bony shell, like she’s in there rooting around, searching for the lie I know I’m telling. Oh, she’s going to know. She’ll know, and then she’ll suck my marrow, and—

She looks away. “Don’t think too long.” She drops the tools on their tray and shuffles out of view. Seconds later, a thump and a creak tells me she’s grabbed her walking stick and left the house. Her raven friend croaks to her as she goes.

When I can no longer hear either of them, I try again to move. I strain as hard as I ever have for anything. Nothing happens. I stop, panting. A trickle of sweat rolls off my face. I can’t even wipe it away or scratch the itch it left behind. What the hell did she give me?

Breathe, Cait. Stay calm. Be patient. It won’t last forever.

I pass the time by going over my site tests, checking my process for mistakes, anything that might trip me up when I finally get to Jonah. The realJonah, not some hallucination conjured by mushroom tea or whatever Baba gave me.

It seemed so real, though. His hand on my shoulder, the expressions on his face, the fear that he would leave me there. That he wouldn’t push the University to back yet another Caitlin Banks shenanigan.

A grunt escapes my throat. At least there is some consolation in the fact that it was an illusion, that no one at uni waited to say, “There she goes, chasing rainbows.”

Again, I try to move. Baba’s tea still holds me fast. Geological tables, mineral properties, and hardness scales run through my head. I recite their numbers and figures to myself one after another before attempting to turn my head, shift my arm, lift a finger. When it fails, I start over. And over.

And over…

My finger twitches, scrapes against something soft and crisp with a rasping sigh. I roll my head on the pillow and lick my lips. Thirsty.

A rustling off to my right jolts me. My head whips back to confront the sound. Baba?

But no. White acoustic tiles appear where smokey rafters hung before. A disembodied voice sounds on a P.A. system in the hall.

And Jonah’s face appears above the bed.

Wait, what—

This can’t be real. But if I can move, I can flee. I struggle to sit up.

Jonah presses me back onto the bed. “Calm down, Cait, or they’ll sedate you again. I had to threaten to bring the University in on this matter to get back in here.” He raises an eyebrow. “Don’t make me look bad.”

I peer into his face, waiting for it to switch to Baba’s. When it doesn’t, and he smiles, I frown. “Jonah?”

“Last I checked.” Reflected light gleams in his gaze, bright spots in the shadows like those in Baba’s face. Back there. In the cottage in the woods.

Where I probably still am.

I close my eyes. “Tell me something only Jonah would know.”

Silence greets my demand, and I look up into his frowning face. The awkward pause draws out while I rote-quote mineral properties in my mind. The machines remain quiet.

Jonah blinks. Shakes his head. “You got drunk after your dissertation defense.”

“Who doesn’t?” I peer at him. “Anyone could guess that.”

“You showed up at my house naked at four in the morning.”

Oh. Okay, he’s probably Jonah. Except even if I am imagining it, I know that event. Well, I sort of remember it.

He leans on the bed rail, his face coming closer as he props on his elbows. “This is about more than finding rocks. More than a car accident. Wanna fill me in?”

I open my mouth, and he holds up a finger.

“If,” he continues, “you can do it calmly.”

I take a slow breath. Press my lips together. Stay calm. Right. Okay. I can do that.

“You won’t believe me.”

He cocks his head, shrugs a little. “Try me.”

My body feels solid, the bed beneath me soft, the smells in the cubby where they’ve stashed me the same as any hospital anywhere. Maybe this is real. I welcome the noise in the corridor in place of forest sounds and raven squawks and, after a pause, I tell him everything—the accident, the lights that looked like people, the animals, the raven, Baba, Baba’s house—except the foot part. I leave that out. Too creepy to think about.

When I stop, he is nodding, a minute movement of his head, as if he is trying to convince himself that this conversation is not the result of a blow to my head.

“Okay. Give me some time to absorb that,” he says. “What about your find? Tell me everything you can. Give me coordinates and describe this clue you found about how to spot the mineral. I want to send a team to confirm your finding while you’re incapacitated. Maybe, by the time you’re back on your feet—” He stops, hesitates, stands upright. One hand goes to his hair, his usual nervous shuffle. “I mean, once you’re all healed, you can join the mining team. If you want to.”

I frown. “Of course, I want to.”

“Details.” He smiles, both hands in his pockets now.

I describe the slender, dark amber- and honey-colored layers between the otherwise blue-grey shale, how to look for the milky scars where the stone had been broken or chipped, and the natural flaw that sent light back in multiple shades of brown. How, unlike most stones of similar color and texture, it breaks off in small, pebble-sized chunks when I chip it away from the surrounding bedrock.

Jonah stops me, pulls out his phone to record, then has me repeat everything I just said.

“Good.” He glances from his phone to my face. “And what was the clue you mentioned? The one that will help you find it again?”

I remember spotting it the first time. Down in that ravine, a quick downpour puddling around my seated body, rising almost to my chest before the rain stopped and it drained away. A chance sunbeam gleaming off the surface of the puddle to shine on the wall of the ravine. That’s what I thought it was, at first. A shine from reflected sunlight.

“The shale layers go from grey to that ruddy brown on both sides of a vein, but as it gets close to the metathracite, it pales to almost pink, as if the color has leached out of it into the mineral between its layers. It’s not a big swath, mind. But that’s a pretty big contrast. It should be easy to see even at a distance.”

“Where, exactly, was your campsite?”

“Coordinates are on my phone. If you can find it. Search the area between where I left the road and where the car landed.” I flash back on that night, the rolling of boulders and trees outside my windshield. I blink the images away. “The university should be able to find it using the geotracker. Look, whoever you send…”

I trail off, stopping myself before I say more about the strangeness of the place. My left foot itches, and I move the right one to scratch it.

It meets only blankets and otherwise empty space. My leg twitches, trying to bring my feet together so I can scratch the itch. I look down at the other end of the bed. There is one hump in the blanket.

One. Not two.

I raise my eyes to Jonah’s and find a grimace on his face.

“It was too mangled, Cait. They couldn’t save it,” he says, reaching toward me.

“No,” I say, my voice sharp, shrill. “Baba did this.” The walls behind him waver, the ceiling shifts from white to sooty to white again. Baba’s soft whisper hovers at the edge of my awareness, teasing, torturing.

Jonah sucks air through his teeth.

“Look,” he says, “you’re safe. You’re in the hospital. Whatever you think you saw wasn’t real. It’s the drugs, Cait.”

“Listen to me, Jonah,” I hiss, pushing all my fear into my words. They tremble with its weight. “There were samples in my car. Look for those and look for my site. It’s important. But whatever you do, don’t let anyone go there alone. They should work in packs, keep watch on one another—”

A machine beside me begins to beep.

“—make them keep watch. Those woods are strange. I told you.”

Jonah squeezes my shoulder. “Cait, calm down. You’re safe here.”

“No.” I shake my head so hard it hurts. Another machine’s alarm joins the first. The wall behind my mentor flickers between Baba’s house and the hospital white. For a moment, Baba’s disinfectant permeates the air. I grab his arm with both hands. “Don’t let them sedate me, Jonah. Don’t let them send me back there!”

He looks alarmed now. He pulls at my fingers, clasped tight around his arm. “Cait, stop this.”

“Jonah, please.”

A third machine joins the chorus, and the duty doctor comes close. His lips move, but the raven’s cries drown his words. The doctor pushes a medicine into my IV and—

The noise stops, replaced by a ringing in my ears and a soughing in the trees behind me. I stand near the edge of a cliff, balanced on one bare foot and what remains of my lower left leg. The stiff breeze of an approaching storm lifts my short hair. Across the gorge, a blob of color wraps around a huge boulder at the opposing cliff’s edge.

My SUV.

Such an odd perspective, this distant view of the boulder that stopped my descent. From here, I see the cracks in the boulder’s foundation. Their fingers reach out into the surrounding cliffside, softening the boulder’s hold on the precipice so that it leans out over empty air. A strong wind could take it down now.

I hobble-turn to face my surroundings. To either side, rough ground edges the precipice, scattered with boulders jutting from or settling into the ground beneath them. I stand at the edge of a twilight forest. Trees crowd this slope all the way up to the ravine where I found the metathracite.

This is Baba’s doing.

I close my eyes. Is she here? Watching? I listen.

The wind.

Birds, far distant, as if they want no part of me.

Traffic. Or, more specifically, trucks. Big ones. As in heavy equipment.

Jonah?

My head goes up, looking for my dig site, but all I see are trees. I take a step back toward the clearing behind me—

Except I can’t. My foot, or rather my stump, won’t move. I look down.

My leg is merging with the ground beneath it. My flesh stretches out and down past rock and stone and bone, rooting itself in the earth. I pull, twist my body, push against the ground with my remaining foot until my toes stretch longer, thickening as they go. They dig past the tendrils of my other leg, reaching toward the marrow of the mountain, anchoring me to this spot.

A tingle spreads from my ankle and lower leg up onto my shins and calves, and I shout. My breath comes faster, noisier. Before me, animals peer around boles, creep out into the open. Two bobcats stand near a lynx. A wolverine hunkers at the base of some nearby scrub. An owl flaps in to land on a branch.

The itch spreads up my legs and I look down. Skin and clothing have thickened into scaly brown. As I watch, my legs merge. I breathe hard and fast, lungs keeping time with my racing heart.

What did Baba give me?

What did the doctors give me?

A grizzly joins the animal audience, rises to its full height, and looks down on me as if I am a morsel too small to consider. An elk, majestic in its size and beauty, ambles into the scene, followed by a small pack of coyotes and a fox pair.

The thickening itch is in my torso now. I twist my shoulders, flailing against this change.

The fae arrive, standing in full view among the animals, all of them moving closer as the wind rises, keening up the cliff face to lift my hair, which thickens and stiffens and won’t fall back into place. I raise my hands to touch it, and my arms freeze, extended toward my head. Twigs, then leaves sprout from my fingers, my forearms, my elbows. My skin thickens into the brown scale of my legs. The bark spreads up my chest, my neck. Even as my hair stretches out into branches thick with foliage, the bark covers my face.

I can’t breathe! My lungs—do I still have lungs?—suck at nothing, like someone has stretched plastic over my face.

But I still hear and feel.

Murmurs, whispers, the electrical sensation against my skin regardless of its new form. The presence of the fae. Close. Touching me. Murmuring some magic. Did they do this?

Over all, the growl of heavy equipment digging into the cliff above the wood. Jonah’s crew, come for my metathracite.

But if I was never in the hospital, if that wasn’t real, how did he know? My thoughts tumble over one another like ants trying to escape a flood and realization slams into me. I am now part of these woods. Will it survive the dig?

Baba’s voice carries on the wind.

“Now we will see,” she whispers, “if the bones of one foot will take the whole body with them when they go. Taste the fruit of your labor. You will feel it all.”

White hot fear races through my veins like sticky sap. I inhale, draw air through my skin, my leaves, and scream. The sound that emerges is the thundering wind of a hundred wings as a whole flock of ravens take flight from my branches. Then they are gone, and the canyon echoes with the grinding of metal on stone as the diggers begin their work.

Five houses line the blind alley, three on the right side, two on the left, and at the end, to the left, stands a three-storied apartment building. I live on the second floor. The dead-end of the street is a ten-foot cinder-block wall, topped by shards of glass of various colours lodged into a layer of concrete to keep away trespassers from climbing the wall and jumping over into the lining of thick rain trees concealing a rather uneventful and nearly invisible colony of government employees.

In the evenings, I stroll on the terrace of my apartment building, taking in the glum orange sunsets behind the Bangalore skyline, or sit on the balcony of my house on the second floor, watching dogs frolic under the yellow light of the street lamps. The muffled voices of a noisy news panel from a TV in a far-off street or the distant wails of sirens on ambulances carrying the infected interrupt the drone of my tinnitus and the otherwise silent nights.

“Ganja… MDMA… Ecstasy… drugs do… drugs do… mujhe drugs do…”

Drugs, though? I wake up to the faraway screams of a man apparently hawking psychedelics late in the night. Mujhe drugs do? Perhaps he is in desperate need of those himself. I sit up, rub my eyes, and train my ears towards the source of the racket; my knackered brain takes a moment to process the sound and locate the wretched junkie.

Is that noise from the house above? I am certain it isn’t. Firstly, no man lives in that house, let alone an addict—the occupant was an old woman. Secondly, the house is at the moment empty and has been so for a while. And thirdly…

“REE AAH CHALK OR BORE TEA…” the faint remnant of another shriek arrives.

… and thirdly, I now recognise that voice. I am not surprised. I would be, had it been yapping about vaccines before the second wave swept over, instead of the celebrity drug scandal. The human megaphone is that anchor from that news channel on a TV playing in some faraway street. It has to be from a faraway street. Mine is empty.

I shut the windows and hit the bed once again.

Thud. Thud. THUD! I jolt awake. 3am. This time, the sound came from above, I am certain. Not the first time though: Like clockwork, taps, thuds and knocks wake me up at 3am precisely. At first, I wondered if the apartment upstairs was haunted. After all, 3am is the witching hour, isn’t it?

Is it her walking stick? Is it her fall? Is it a product of my mind, after all? I google “auditory hallucinations at 3am”. Apparently, my malady has a medical name: a benign condition ironically termed the exploding head syndrome. Look it up. There is always a rational explanation playing spoilsport. I am disappointed. I am more open to the prospect of a ghost with a walking stick haunting the house above me than my head benignly exploding.

The previous occupant of the house upstairs, the old lady, lived by herself like me. She needed me every now and then to run her errands. “Can you bring me a packet of milk and a few buns?” Or, “My washing machine isn’t working; can you take a look?” she would request from behind the mask covering her wrinkled lips, her veiny hand clutching a four-legged walking stick. Back then, the street was populated; she knew everyone, and in return, everyone knew her, but I was her preferred choice, her go-to person to do those odd jobs. The neighbours, when they were too busy to lend her a hand—which seemed to be all the time—would encourage me to help the woman as they showered praises on me, insisting that in their eyes, I was an ideal young man, a shining example, and lamented the laziness of their own flesh and blood. Some would earnestly declare to the woman that I was her son in all but blood (more like a grandson if age was the sole criterion), and others would playfully goad her to make me the heir apparent, upon which they would promptly disperse, and I would set out to play my assigned role as the ideal (grand)son.

I would complete the chores, then spend a few minutes chatting with her over a cup of ginger tea, seated on the divan in her living room. For reasons unknown, whenever I conversed with her, my hands would not quiver when I held the cup, nor would my heart pound—my Pavlovian responses reserved for nearly everyone else I interact with. Perhaps her age, or maybe her isolation and vulnerability, did not present a subconscious threat. Conversations with her typically revolved around the prospects for my marriage and my salary, which then invariably veered into comparisons with her son’s earnings in the US and her trip there a few years ago.

One day, before the second wave of the pandemic, she kicked the bucket—literally in the morning, then figuratively later that evening—when she collapsed in the bathroom due to an abrupt drop in her blood pressure. A team of caretakers arrived in an ambulance, hired remotely by her son, and carted her body off to the morgue. As they did so, I held my phone, camera pointed towards her lifeless body wrapped in a white shroud on the stretcher and live-streamed the happenings to her grief-stricken and teary-eyed son in the US. He was virtually inconsolable.

A week after her demise, the son descended, organised the funeral, hired a property manager, probated her will, patted my shoulder and let out a sigh of grief, after which he promptly ascended once again to the land of the free, leaving me—his brother in all but blood—behind with my share of the inheritance: an aloha shirt one size too large and a pack of M&Ms whose price, oddly, was listed in rupees instead of dollars.

Ever since, the fully furnished house has remained unoccupied. The pandemic emptied not just the houses in my street, but in Bangalore in general, which meant that the property manager has been unsuccessful so far in renting the house to new tenants. Until today, that is. I learn from him that a new tenant will be moving into that apartment. I heave a sigh of relief. In the evening, the packers and movers arrive in their truck. For some reason, the truck is a huge eighteen-wheeled water tanker, followed by two more trucks of similar proportions. I am confused, but on cloud seven. Eight, if I really push it, and that’s saying a lot; I am not very expressive.

A human; a ghost; I will take anything as long as it’s a neighbour. As things stand, I feel like a ghost myself. You know that age old philosophical question? If a man lives all his life alone on an island and no one has ever seen him, is he a ghost? Or maybe it was about a tree falling in a forest. I can’t remember. Anyway, I don a mask, slip into my slippers and step out to meet my new upstairs neighbour. On the stairs, I bump into two men—packers and movers—carefully carrying an aquarium, about four feet long and three feet wide, full of murky water.

“Is the tenant upstairs?” I ask. One of them, with a cigarette dangling at the corner of his lips, tilts his head and gestures at the aquarium he is holding. I follow his gaze. Two rubbery and undulating earthworm-brown appendages emerge from the liquid and press against the side of the aquarium facing me. A dark, hazy blob then appears in the muddied water and a moment later, the remaining six tentacles and the head follow. Now, I can clearly see through the glass. My new neighbour, it turns out, is a cephalopod. An octopus, to be precise.

“Sorry, the water is murky. I didn’t notice you,” I apologise and immediately regret saying the word murky. I have never interacted with an octopus before. I don’t socialise much.

Two tentacles wave left and right in unison. I wave back.

“Hi, I am your neighbour, Shekar. I live downstairs on the second floor right beneath yours.”

I notice that one of the tentacles has no suckers at the end, which means the correct pronouns are he/him. Females have suckers on all eight tentacles. But then an octopus has nine brains, eight in each of the tentacles and one in the head. So, technically, the correct pronouns could be they/them. I am confused. I sense a quiver in my hands. Confusion breeds quiver and quiver, confusion. It is a vicious feedback loop. I manage to derail the cycle for the time being: I assure myself that I will be interacting with him (them) in the second person, and hence, I needn’t worry about offending him (them) with inappropriate pronouns.

The other six of his tentacles perform a complex dance in the water, swaying up and down, left and right, with metrical fluidity. Perhaps it is a sign language known only to their species. Unfortunately, I do not speak octopus. Bangalore is a cesspool of people (and also octopuses, apparently) coming from around the country and speaking a variety of languages.

I press my thumbs to the middle and ring fingers, make the standard Bharatanatyam mudra, rotate my wrists forward and backward and move my eyes from side to side as I tap my feet rhythmically. I don’t really know the classical dance form. I want to give the impression that I am genuinely trying to communicate with the cephalopod. I wish I were good at socialising. I feel the gaze of the two men on me and hear a snigger, and I can feel my heart beating faster. The eight-legged neighbour pauses for a moment… a moment longer than I am comfortable with. I fiddle my thumbs as I try to gauge his silence. Is he confused? Did I say something rude? Does he know Bharatanatyam? That would be a sight to witness—an eight-legged dancing octopus.

“Looks like I am holding you up,” I finally say and end the awkward silence, giving way to the two men.

Is there a universal grammar, not only among humans, as Prof. Chomsky theorised, but also between humans and cephalopods? I am certain that such an ancient language exists, passed down from a common ancestor to both species, quarantined somewhere deep in our subconscious. As much as I am determined to uncover this primaeval means of communication to beat the lockdown blues, deep down, I wish Kannada were made mandatory for everyone living in Bangalore. I don’t speak or understand Kannada either, but at least I have the “Learn Kannada in 30 Days” pocketbook handy for reference.

I gather from the internet that octopuses eat crabs, snails, and small fish. In the evening, I use the ten-minute delivery app to order a live sea crab which arrives in an ice box. This is another attempt at breaking the ice with the inhabitant overhead. The crab is disappointed that she is going to be eaten alive and hums a haunting dirge from the ice box. I don’t quite understand the meaning because I don’t speak crab either, but I discern the emotion from the sorrowful tune. Pain and the fear of death definitely belong in the vocabulary of the primaeval language.

I knock on the door. No answer. The windows have been sealed shut. The door doesn’t open, but the octopus (What is his name? Does he have a name? For some reason, the word Ashtavakra pops into my head.) shows up behind the glass window. One of the tentacles points upwards. Is he flipping me off? I think he wants me to go upstairs. I take the stairs to the terrace one floor above. At the centre of the terrace is a newly installed large circular trapdoor of thick acrylic glass surrounded by a metallic frame.

A few wetsuits and scuba gear are hung on the lime green plastic rope the old lady used to dry her clothes on. I pick one suit and wear it along with the paraphernalia (including the COVID mask underneath the scuba diving mask because it is strictly mandated by the government), open the door and take a plunge into my new neighbour’s blue home. Thankfully, the water is now clear. All the walls have been torn down, the windows and doors sealed with a layer of thick glass, and the floors covered with gravel of kaleidoscopic colours: the house is one big aquarium.

The previous occupant’s furniture and decorations are still here. The divan and the coffee table casually drift upside down in the water and pass me by. A few aquatic plants, which I don’t recognise, have replaced the coffee table and sway calmly underwater. The Madhubani paintings on the wall appear soft and fluid and remind me of Monet. I extend my right arm for a handshake. Instead, he lunges towards my left hand; the suckers under his tentacles reach out and grab the sea crab and at once, he begins munching. I may add that his manners leave something to be desired. The crab stares at me without an expression as her legs are torn apart. I look away momentarily and begin analysing and interpreting the Monet-turned-Madhubani wall hangings.

I turn back only to find that my host has disappeared. Where has he gone? Is he preparing something for me? That’s very polite of him, but it is not practical for me to consume anything underwater. I swim to the kitchen. He isn’t there. The coldness of my host hurts me a little. It is one thing to refuse what your host offers and something else when the host offers nothing at all. I head back to the hall. Perhaps he had to use the restroom. I wait. Thoughts shape reality and what you think, you become. The thought of my neighbour attending to nature’s call instantly reflects in the reality of my own bladder. I have a sudden and intense urge to pee. I look around, he is nowhere: I let the Nile flow out of my wet suit and merge with the Mediterranean sea around me. I am not proud of what I have done, but as the saying goes, no one can stop the incontinence whose time has come. I swim to the paintings on the wall and resume my attempt at art criticism.

I am not well versed in the art appreciation side of things, considering that I had been an engineer all my adult life until I became unemployed, thanks to COVID. Now that I have some time on my hands (in my tank rather—I check the pressure gauge; I have some air still), I decide to spend some of it on art appreciation. The vibrant colours of the painting, although they took birth as a static image, are infused with time and motion by the magic of underwater refraction. A parrot with blue plumage, a deer under a tree, a woman with long dark hair that flows like water, her dreamy almond-shaped eyes that… blink?

With eyes narrowed and a frown on my forehead, I move towards the frame for a closer look. Something is off. I lift my finger and run it through the painting. It is unexpectedly soft. Then, a movement. Then, a realisation. How could I have forgotten? Octopuses are the authority on concealment and camouflaging. In an instant, my host reverts his colour back to the boring brown, appears in front of me and casually drifts away. I get it now. He wants to play.

I close my eyes and begin counting to thirty. He has disappeared once again. I swim around seeking. Now, he has blended into the gravel. Now, he has hidden behind the seaweed. He is a master of disguise, but I am not far behind. This fascinating game of interspecies hide and seek goes on for a while. I am having a good time. I check the gauge: a casual periodic look to make sure the pressure in my air tank is at a safe level. The readings indicate I have some more time. I begin counting to thirty once again. One… two… three. Out of nowhere, guilt, seemingly causeless, flows through my body; as if some remorse lay hidden at the bottom of the tank waiting for an opportune moment to enter my lungs and course through my veins.

I stop the game in its tracks and head to the trap door, get out of the water and get out of the gear. I draw in a long breath and let out an exhale. An approaching sound. The wailing siren atop a passing ambulance grows higher and higher in pitch as it comes closer and closer. The ambulance is visible from where I stand on the terrace, rushing through the winding, deserted road. The sound is now unbearably high-pitched as if it were carrying within it the accumulated final gasps of all the infected the vehicle has transported so far. The ambulance passes by, the siren grows weaker and eventually dies down and the quiet returns, a more appropriate companion to the setting sun. I make a mental note never to breathe air from a tank again.

In the following days, whenever I pass by his house on my way to the terrace for the evening stroll, I dart a quick glance at the window. He is usually absent, or maybe his camouflage is at work, blending him with the transparent glass. Sometimes, he appears, performing his intricate dance of which I can make neither head nor tentacle. I, in turn, acknowledge the courtesy with a single nod of my head and a short smile with pursed lips. Water from the aquarium above my roof begins seeping through. The ceiling in my bedroom turns damp. I paste a sticky note on his window describing the situation and politely requesting him to do something about it. He slowly lifts one of his tentacles up. Is he flipping me off? Or is he inviting me for another game of hide and seek?

I write down a message and paste another sticky note. I must get going. Have a nice day.

In a matter of days, the novelty of the eight-legged dweller has worn  off, and annoyance has taken its place. Moisture from the roof has infiltrated the cupboards, mildew has invaded my clothes, and a musty smell has engulfed the house. A fortnight has passed and nothing has been done to repair my roof.

My clothes are all mouldy. Did you give it a thought or maybe nine? I paste another sticky note to his window.

He responds with an erect tentacle as usual. Something—perhaps a noticeable increase in the speed of the tentacle’s tent-pitching act—convinces me he is flipping me off this time. I escalate the matter from sticky notes to messages in bottles, which I drop through the trapdoor.

My house is too humid, and my kitchen smells like fungus. Do you understand smell?

For some reason, my usual hesitant self takes a backseat as I send these messages, spiced with a tinge of rudeness, through the bottle. Perhaps the indirect form of communication through  a bottle inspires a degree of confidence not unlike the confidence of an anonymous troll on social media.

Patches of saffron paint start to peel off from the wet roof and fall on my stove, contaminate my tomato chutney and besmirch my podi dosa, both of which I unwittingly consume.

Did the fellowship of tentacles discuss my matter? Do you have board meetings?

Over the following days, drops of water accumulate on the ceiling, threaten to fall anytime and eventually carry out the threat by falling into the chilli chicken. I like my chilli chicken dry. Having endured the ignominy long enough, I head upstairs to lodge a complaint in person. My aversion to quarrels, coupled with the disturbing thought of breathing air from a tank, stopped direct confrontation so far. But not today, not when you wet my chilli chicken. I slip into a wetsuit and dive into his house with a mighty splash proportionate to the disdain I now feel for him. I attempt to voice my concern but realise I can’t because I have no voice underwater, so I register my protest on a placard instead.

Your water is leaking into my house. Do something! I state the obvious on the placard that happens to be in my hand using an underwater marker that also turns up in my other hand. In turn, he grabs the placard with his eight slithering tentacles and squats on it. A moment later, words appear on his body, thanks to the chromatophores on his skin.

“What are you gonna do, huh?” The words scroll to the left like an LED message on a city bus and make way to Hindi, “Kya ukhaad lega tu?” which in turn move aside to let in Kannada, “Enannu kittu haakuttiri?”

Then he mic-drops the placard and floats away lazily. So he understands English, Hindi and Kannada. What else has he not told me? He is not as stupid as I thought; he is outright sinister. The mic-drop is effective. I have no trilingual comebacks up my sleeve. My anxious brain is slow that way. The clever comebacks never come when they matter. I retreat in defeat.

Tap. Tap. TAP! Drops of water trickle onto my forehead and tap me awake. It is 3am. A small hole has formed on the roof above my bed. The water now drips at a steady pace into my bedroom. The bed, the pillow and my blanket are soaking wet, and the water on the floor has reached the level of my knees. I find it difficult to go back to sleep. I toss and turn on the bed. I try counting the drops of water, hoping it would help me fall asleep. As I turn to the right, I notice a stick under the murky water by my bedside. I dip my hands and pull out the old woman’s four-legged walking stick. I tap it on the roof, and yell.

“Hey! Your water is leaking. Keep your filthy, disease-ridden water to yourself!”

Splash. Splash. SPLASH! I wake up to splashing water. Midnight hunger pangs prompt me to get out of bed. The house is dark. The electricity had to be cut off for safety reasons now that the water has reached the switchboards. In the dark, I row my canoe and make my way towards the kitchen. At the bedroom door, something makes contact with my canoe with a gentle thud. I turn on my phone’s flashlight to take a look.

It is a body wrapped from head to toe in a white shroud, drifting in the water. I know who it belonged to. As if by instinct, I call up ‘my brother’ in the USA. I begin live-streaming the body as it passes me by. As if on cue, he too at once begins weeping uncontrollably. I sing a lullaby to console him. It is the same song that I heard from the now dead crab. I do not sing in public for fear of mockery, but now I gather courage because it is needed. He calms down, occasionally letting out an involuntary hiccup. He tells me he likes the aloha shirt I happened to be wearing.

“The shirt looks good on you,” he compliments with a bittersweet smile on his face as he wipes his tears.

“It is a bit too large for my size,” I say.

“Give it a couple of washes and it will shrink,” he assures. I feel better.

“Can you talk to your tenant about the water leaking into my house?” I submit my request. He looks off-camera for a moment as though something distracted him, then looks back at the camera, then excuses himself and ends the call citing some urgent business. I continue my voyage towards the kitchen.

More bodies pass me by in the living room on my way to the kitchen, only this time they are wrapped in orange shrouds. I point the flashlight around and look for the source of the bodies. A large hole in one corner of the roof is where they are dripping out from. I notice a female standing on the sofa in my living room accompanied by a man holding a camera on a tripod. A journalist I believe; she is in tattered and road-weary clothes, reporting passionately on the drifting dead bodies.

“I ask my cameraman to pan around and show you the sheer number of bodies floating around in this living room,” she says. The cameraman obliges. “We have counted up to a hundred and six bodies before giving up. Who suffers for whose mistakes? Who is answerable? Who is responsible? What we see here…”

She notices me passing by, pauses for a moment, waves at me and instructs her camera man to point his camera towards me. I pull over my canoe towards the sofa.

“Here is a living man, alone among the dead, with nothing but a canoe to keep him afloat and an oversized shirt on his body, rowing in darkness, heading to an unknown place at this hour in the night. Let’s talk to him,” she turns to me. “Sir, can we talk to you for a minute?”

“Sure. But let me assure you, the shirt will shrink after a couple of washes.”

“This man is full of hope despite the wetness of his predicament. These are the kinds of stories, these tiny droplets of hope, we must tell as the tsunami of grief sweeps our country. Tell me sir, how are you feeling?”

“I am feeling hungry…”

“He is starving… hmm.”

“… which usually happens to me in the middle of the night. I am heading towards…”

“He is in search of food, clutching his empty stomach… hmm.”

“… the fridge in the kitchen.”

“Do you wish to say something to our viewers?”

“I just wish that the cephalopod above realises his mistakes and rectifies the situation with a sense of urgency before my house drowns completely.”

“This man still has faith in the cephalopod above and appeals to his good nature.”

Sympathy in her eyes, she wraps her arm around my shoulder, as the cameraman captures the moment. With that, my interview ends, and I continue my journey towards the fridge.

Roar. Roar. ROAR! I wake up floating neck-deep in cold water that consumes me from below, an utter darkness that absorbs me from above and a claustrophobia that devours me from within. I let out gasps as I struggle to breathe in the small pocket of air between the water and the roof. A light from under the water emerges to the surface. It is a TV, playing that news channel moderated by that news megaphone of an anchor. He materialises in one of the ten boxes on the screen. The remaining nine are occupied each by the eight tentacles and one head of the cephalopod. In a separate frame, I see a picture of me. Underneath it is the headline in large red letters:

BREAKING: IMPATIENT NEIGHBOUR PUTS A CEPHALOPOD IN A CHOKE HOLD #STOPCHOKINGCEPHALOPOD #STOPCEPHALOPODCHOKING

“I want to tell you, viewers, that things are not as bad as this man is making out to be,” the male anchor screams, pointing at my picture. “Yes, his house is flooding, but as you can see, he is sailing in smooth waters…” A short video recording of me rowing towards the kitchen last night is played on repeat mode.

“… rowing in the right direction and flowing smoothly ahead. Yet he harasses his neighbour with rude messages in glass bottles. Yet he complains to the world. And his complaints are given credence by journalists like her who interviewed him last night. This negativity is what we must reject as a nation. Put him on the line, put him on the line,” he orders his crew. And suddenly, I am on the screen in an eleventh box. The nine fragments of my neighbour in the nine boxes writhe violently.

“Tell me, Mr. Shekar, why are you holding this poor cephalopod, your neighbour, in a chokehold?”

“No… I’m not,” I say, spitting some water out and gulping some in.

“Yes, you are.”

“Okay… Because he… is the one responsible… I guess,” I say, gasping for air in the claustrophobic space between water and the roof.

“Mr. Shekar, you behave irrationally. The cephalopod is responsible, and he is doing his best. It is not easy working with nine brains, each thinking differently especially when one is under a chokehold.”

“Chokehold… is probably not the most suitable word… in the context… of an octopus,” I suggest to the anchor. A mistake.

“HOW DARE YOU? HOW DARE YOU TELL ME HOW TO DO MY JOB?” The inevitable scream ensues. “Apologise, you anti-… anti-rational!” In the nine boxes, the nine-brained neighbour matches the anchor’s passion and writhes even more violently.

“Okay he… may be… doing… his best… but he has had… enough time… to do some… thing… and now I am… drowning.”

“For God’s sake! Give the cephalopod some breathing room, will you?”

“Breathing room? Interesting… choice of… words.”

“Mr. Shekar! Are you dumb? I told you the cephalopod is working as hard as he can for your benefit. How anti-rational can you be? Stop breathing down his neck!”

“Breathing down?“

“There he goes again. Give him some time, will you? Give him some time. He will take your breath away!”

“Okay… I’m… holding… my… breath.”

And the rock we dug out of
the side of the hill
proved to be so radioactive
that two geologists exposed to it
went up in flames like touch-paper.

Only three of the men
returned from the mission to the dark side.
Some kind of green-scaled three-headed creature,
about twenty fields tall,
attacked the team,
tore many of them to shreds.

We lost Dr Ehlerimen to a bog,
and Professor Casey to a sudden landslide.
And our chef, when out scouring
the local plant life for prospective garnishes,
was sucked up and swallowed
by what is known in the lab 
as a crocodile flower.

Yes, I got your letter.
Crime’s on the rise.
There are violent protests in the street.
Countries in the Middle East
are talking war.
I agree, Earth is a dangerous place.
But just you try living elsewhere.

The place is hideous, though. Deep and unlit and choking.

How have I seen it, you ask? I woke up there once. Take a look at me, is it that hard to accept?

It was Angela who taught me about sleeping in the ocean, and that is how it all got started.

We were on a friends’ trip to Cancún. My lover was there, but we’re not together anymore. We split up before the year was over, you’ll see. Angela was married to Kyle at the time. We referred to them, jointly, as AK, like the gun. But they’ve split, too. We’ll get to all that.

Vicki flew in a day after we did and threw a beer bottle at Jackson her first night. The rest of the trip she guessed her punishment was coming, she feared a storm would level the place, blow us all out to sea. A typhoon for a Blue Moon, that was our limerick about it.

Rick and William were there, drunk and sunburned as ever.

As for the saltwater trick, Angela brought it up late on Friday. Two a.m., maybe two-thirty.

We were talking about insomnia, about what we had tried, how long we had suffered. Did we secretly enjoy the sleepless nights, that sort of chat. When Vicki walked up Angela said, ‘What have you two heard about being a wave?’

Vicki and I hurried to say it first: ‘Being a wave?’

‘I haven’t tried it and I don’t believe any of it. But what they say is if you float in warm ocean water, if you really sleep—’

Vicki was nervous already, ‘So you’re not talking about bringing it back to our tub? Like, with buckets?’

‘No, you walk out to the beach. You take off your clothes and then keep walking.’

‘No way. And how can you say some trick for sleeping is to just fall asleep? What am I missing?’

‘I said I don’t think it will do anything. But what I hear is you float on your back, it just sort of—’

I cut in: ‘One of you should try floating on your face.’

Vicki glared hard: ‘Don’t, Wayne.’ She was one of those, just talking about something made her panic.

Angela returned my smile, and I responded, ‘What? She said she doesn’t think it’ll work. Maybe it will if you try it face-down.’

‘I’m serious. Don’t.’

We each checked our phones and read from various accounts: blogs, Medium, Tumblr. Most of the pages were a kind of religious counterculture. One of them read: Your left hand and foot will drift out toward the east, while your right hand and foot will stay in the west. Make sure it’s cloudy or the starlight will drill straight through you. You are immaterial. If a boat shines its light on you, you’re finished.

In the end—if we pulled it off, if we turned to brine—we would be pale smears across dark water. We would have the best night’s sleep in our lives. When our eyes filled with sunrise we would collect ourselves, become whole again. Flesh first, then bone, the opposite of what you would think.

You can still find your things. Despite that it seems you floated off, you will not have gone far.

‘What about the part about burning to death from starlight?’ It was Vicki who mentioned it, though I was going to. What I asked was, ‘And what about the part about drowning?’

‘I’ve said over and over I don’t believe it.’

Vicki was out. And by now it was almost four: too late for Angela and me to try, either. We agreed to wander off some time the next night, the last night of our trip, so long as it was cloudy. After the bar closed, maybe.

No one suggested we bring Kyle or my lover, Gwendolyn.

Did I tell you? Angela let me kiss her the next afternoon. Our mouths tasted of rum and when we were finished she grinned around her straw. Her dimples cut deep and gorgeous. Cut to the bone, for all I knew.

She had huge eyes, and I let myself believe she chose that top with me in mind.

At midnight, when Vicki repeated that she was too frightened to try, I followed Angela past the breakers. We did not sleep much; we mostly kissed and touched in the shallows. At times her laughter was cut short with a wave. You wondered if your unseen, liquid fingers had skimmed into her mouth. I can’t tell you how erotic that was.

We must have nodded off, though, because at once it was daybreak and my torso felt unspooled. Our limbs were dissolved together the same as two flavors of milk, which were adrift on a third, vast, salty flavor.

Warmth from the gathering dawn woke us in time to put our bodies together.

Angela and I were friends already but we kept in better contact now. We sent each other texts which we erased at every step. There was something ghostly about that, as if Kyle had discovered us and the AK went off twice and we kept on talking.

You’ll remember the Iron Wolf spill near Houston; that was the second Tuesday in August. By Sunday the protests had reached the hundreds of thousands, at Exxon’s offices in Irving and Spring, and all along the Texas coast.

Angela texted me the following Wednesday:

you watching this iron wolf thing?

I wrote back:

Ofc

the protestors are talking about hiring boats

give you any ideas?

Not really

it gives me an idea

I did my best to dissuade her. Yet at the same time I wanted her to do it, I wanted to go. We could spend the days on board, making love in time with the ocean, at whatever pace it set. At night we could sleep within the spill, spreading out with the petroleum until we were acres. Square kilometers. They would measure our bodies in nation-sizes.

You know what they do to oil spills right? 

ik they burn them, that’s got nothing to do with us

You told me starlight alone would put holes thru us

yes, and those stars will see us from space, wyatt

from actual space

*wayne sorry baby

She sent an email to the group, then privately asked Vicki to agree, or appear to. She asked that of a few others, too, promising they could back out at any time. It had to look as though we would all make the drive to Galveston, and commission several boats.

Why Vicki? Because she had worked it out already. ‘She was there the first night, in Cancún. A woman knows.’ This by itself was reason for concern. If Vicki knew, everyone knew. But Angela wanted to keep her close.

That night Gwendolyn turned her mouth downward and asked, ‘Did you see this crazy thing from Angela? She has lost her mind.’

‘About a protest? Why’s it crazy?’

‘She’s getting a bunch of us in a boat and we’re heading out there with the marines and the USDA and the spill? Christ, no. I’m not going and you’re not either.’

It wasn’t the marines, it was the Coast Guard. And it wasn’t the USDA, it was the Environmental Protection Agency. But I had other things to correct her on:

‘Actually I am going.’

‘The hell you are.’

‘We’ll be cleaning this up for ten years. It might never get clean.’

‘You sound a lot like her right now.’

‘I mean, you and I got the same email.’

‘What she’s not getting is that Exxon will be sued dead, and they’ll lose every lease in the U.S. There’s a way to handle this without sailing to the middle of some—, some—.’ She stammered a bit, then finished with: ‘Some grease fire.’

We argued until something happened to her eyes. I knew the conversation was going to shift. No: I knew we would shift.

‘I get it, Wayne. She looks great in a wrap. But honey, she’s not going to fuck you no matter how late y’all stay out.’

Like I said, if Vicki knew, word was all around. Gwendolyn was crying in the end. I felt awful and twice asked her to come along.

With such short notice we couldn’t find an excursion boat, though a fishing guide agreed to take us if we paid for a full group. It was twelve hundred for the night and he did not once blink at the terms: leaving at dusk, dropping anchor at the Iron Wolf site. No need for bait. No need for tackle.

He was in his mid-thirties with lean, sun-wrecked legs and a large silver crucifix. He had named his boat Seven Eves; he made constant jokes about soyboys and bailouts and seaside elites. I liked him despite it all, and did not mention that the Texas coast was still a coast. I did not ask who subsidized his rent when his best source of income was parked in a marina.

It did not occur to me that we would drip crude on his deck until we arrived. He was nonchalant: ‘Don’t worry, money washes everything out.’ He told us to go swim, that he’d be fishing with Bill Clinton’s old partners while we did. It was one of those punchlines, you laugh because you don’t get it at first.

Overnight we swam and took the horizons for ourselves. There was a black chasm above us and one just underneath, and there were no ships, no sounds of ships. The water was almost body temperature and I mentioned sensory deprivation a few times, though Angela kept shushing me. The idea of a tank the size and shape of creation made her anxious.

But she did not comment that Seven Eves was drifting further and further off. A hundred yards or more. A speck we’d mostly forgotten.

There was no coast guard, no EPA or activists. No seagulls. No fish, that we could tell. And so much for my idea of photographing other protestors, of sending the image home to Gwendolyn as proof of something.

We had a deep, perfect rest, and when we woke our hands were miles from us. You had to plan ahead if you wanted to put fingers through her hair.

On the drive back I told Angela her mascara was running. Her only response was that she wasn’t wearing any.

If she was concerned, she did not let on. I think she worried less about her body composition and more about my car interior, at least for a while.

We bought towels at a hardware store in Conroe and began wiping dark, thick fluid from our eyes. I thought she looked sexy with black lips but she was intent on keeping them clean. She stayed at it with the rags, but the fluid kept coming forth. It was starting to drench our clothes. She unclasped her necklace, which her grandmother had left her.

‘Don’t let me forget this.’

She put it in the glove compartment with my unpaid utility bills. I tried making a blackmail joke but she didn’t get it. And I thought it was best not to explain.

She asked, ‘How would we even google this?’

‘You mean, this?’ I held up a palm, which was the same shade as coal.

‘Jesus, look at you.’

‘I keep trying not to.’

‘And it’s not like I could just: hey Siri, what’s this black Crisco coming out of my pores?’

Her phone answered: ‘I found this on the web—’ and we cracked up. It was probably the last time laughing for both of us. For good.

‘You don’t suppose?’

‘Suppose what?’

Angela smelled one of the rags and made a face. I knew exactly what she was going to say: ‘It smells like motor oil.’

‘Mine does? Or yours does?’

‘We both do.’

She tried a few searches but was quick to give up.

‘Your phone isn’t working?’

‘I’m not working.’

I nodded: my hands were slick on the steering wheel, and when we stopped at the Valero in Madisonville I could barely open the car door or get my wallet out. I could barely put the transmission in park. We tried playing it down. We said we’d pour ourselves into the tank to get better fuel economy.

But dark humor didn’t work. Everything was already dark, including the taste in our mouths and the heavy sensation of bile in our guts. It was dark crude oil that came forth when we sweat. Came from our tear ducts when we cried.

If Gwendolyn and Kyle had not figured it out yet they would now: the outpouring of 10W-30 was some new sexually-transmitted disease we had concocted and passed to each other, without once making love.

Amen, if we were going to be blamed for it we might as well do it: we stopped in Corsicana for the night (it was a few minutes past three). We had no luggage and no way to answer our calls, which kept coming. Our thumbs slid ineffectively across our phone screens, we could neither answer them nor dial out.

For all we knew we would die in that room, unable to open the door or knock on it, or use the hotel phone.

Our clothes came off in slick, easy gestures. We put towels on the sheets but there was no use. The bed was void-stained in no time.

Angela’s breath tasted of catalytic converter but I did not give a damn. I breathed her in and drank her. I gently bit her. She was three states of matter, then: gas, hydrocarbon, petra.

She spoke more than I would have thought. She was profane. She was propane, too. You found yourself thinking of hell almost constantly.

Vicki and Gwendolyn and Angela stayed in touch with William. With Rick. Whether they were deliberately shutting me out or it only happened like that, who could say?

Jackson was the last to stop taking my calls, which strangers had to place, after I handed them my phone and told them my passcode. And I’d be damned if Kyle and I would start over together. (I was damned as it was.)

I lost my job. No matter. Living alone wouldn’t work out, besides. What was I going to do with the front lock, the fridge? The coin-operated laundry?

What was I going to do with the coins?

I mostly wandered and dug through garbage for food. Don’t act disgusted, none of the trash I ate was as foul as my sulfuric breath.

I hitchhiked to Nebraska, only walking at night, fully covered up. I took rides from men in pickups, anyone who had room for me in his truck bed. My jacket was sodden with sweat-oil, and when I dozed, light petroleum came from the sides of my mouth. It looked like the strangest of mustaches.

I waited during the day, usually sleeping under a bridge or in a highway barn. On a map, my route was almost straight up. North star north. It felt like a pilgrimage.

I haven’t told you what my plan was yet. Only that it was magnificent.

When the miles and poor sleep overcame me, I checked into an emergency room in Wichita. I was certain my organs had turned to crude, yet every scan was inconclusive, starting with the ultrasound of my bladder.

Never mind the results, I was pissing motor oil and had done it in front of the nurses.

‘There is this life hack for insomniacs. You sleep in the ocean and it turns you into ocean. In the morning, if the water is clean, you turn all the way back. But what if the water wasn’t clean?’

The checkout paperwork read likely organ abscess, but I drenched it black by touching it. I was the perfect censor, I could redact any document.

The desk attendant said, ‘Did you talk to them about that?’

‘I tried. They won’t hear it.’

‘That’s not normal, sir.’

‘Tell me about it.’

‘Let me get someone.’ It was the second time she had offered to.

If I was bent on extermination, I could have just stripped from my clothes and stood oil-side out in the sun. But it was more than that: I wanted a ride. I wanted to be stretched into a thousand-mile shape, to sleep and dream. To stay fully enclosed in metal for a hundred hours.

Suicidal? No. Though whether I woke up again was secondary.

I meant to water-slide the oil pipeline from Steele City to Port Arthur, which was fewer than a hundred miles from Galveston, where this began.

In Corsicana she asked me, ‘How much of your life do you think you’ll just let go?’

I stirred. She was stirring, too. Her question roused both of us. I had fallen asleep to her soft hands, her strong forearms on my chest and arms. My abdomen.

It was a deep-tissue oil massage, in a way. But the deep tissue and the oil were one and the same.

‘What’s that?’

She said, ‘The things you want to do. I don’t know, volunteer at the SPCA. See your kids get married. How much of that do you think you’ll have to let go now?’

‘This isn’t going to kill us. Angela.’

She grinned. I could hear her oils respond to the movement in her face. ‘You forgot my name for a second.’

I had, though I’d never admit it. She reached over and touched my diesel throat.

‘It’s alright. It happens with affairs. Happens all the time.’

‘I’ll take your word for it.’

‘It’s the whole point, actually. Affairs are soul-to-soul. They go right past our names and go straight to the essence.’

I did not consider the distribution hub in Oklahoma, or the refinery in Kansas. So I must have been collected, left in a barrel, hauled, unloaded and poured out, all while dreaming of Angela’s coconut rum and warm lips. Her turbulent mind.

I woke up in that underground Louisiana cave with no chance of sleep anymore. My insomnia was crueler than ever, likely because there was no way to drown or swim or set fire to the place, and no clear way out.

The mind has to wander before it can sleep, and there was no room for wandering here.

Had I not remembered AP Organic Chemistry, what I might have done was name the place Chevronia and install myself as its eternal president. Serve as its listless tyrant. I never let myself mention hell. I did my best not to think of this in religious terms.

Instead I tried reciting the principles of surface tension. Tried listing the conditions which allowed liquids to oppose great forces, including the force of gravity. I tried repeating the adhesion coefficients between petroleum and various surfaces, namely mineral surfaces. I tried some examples of Young’s equation, and used trigonometry to determine contact angles.

The theory escaped me, yet in applied terms I found my fluid hands reaching up, my limbs pushing into tiny apertures in the cave walls. I found myself spreading, breaking apart, splitting into a network of arteries and veins. Of capillaries, really, because that was my only way out, was it not? Capillary action?

Had we conversed at the time, you would have heard one hundred near-silent voices. Had I any willpower at all, it would have been the sum of one hundred separate wills.

I cannot describe what my form was when I reached grade level. Better said: what my forms were. And thank god it was pre-dawn or I would have combusted into a wildfire. One that lived up to its name: vast and truly wild.

Angela, it seemed, did not mind holding out until dawn.

She was sublime. Tall and bulky. She had no face, at least not one the news helicopters could capture on film. Those choppers were a safe distance off, forty feet at least.

While my escape had carved me into scores of nightmarish cubist works, some other force had accumulated her into a single crude oil beast, eight feet in height, with the strength of a rhino.

She was in flames. Yet the way she strode through downtown Fort Worth, you could tell she had no pain at all.

“Circus Sized Man” Sets Himself Ablaze in Texas, Reason for Protest Unclear, read the chyron.

Angela promised me we would turn to waves. Ocean waves, radio waves, I guess it didn’t matter. She had lived up to the oath, good for her.

I had to turn away from the screen, one of a few dozen in that electronics store downtown (I was in New Orleans by then). If I saw her fall to one hand, or saw any anguish in her gait, I would have splashed right there where I stood. I would have been a rorschach pattern on the sidewalk. Not that I wasn’t a rorschach already.What was the last thing she said to me, after we checked out of the Corsicana hotel? It was worth it, baby. Not one of them can touch us now.

She’s clear, crisp in my mind’s eye. Her eyes shine. Her hair falls loose. She’s achingly beautiful.

“It’s your turn, Daddy. Stop texting.” Sara is glaring at me from across the table, cross.

“Just a sec, sweetie. It’s Josh about a job for me.”

It was more than a second. I had priorities. I was stupid.

“Daddy?” She’s exasperated. She’s adorable. She’s…

For the first time in a long time, I can see Sara’s face, too. Clear, bright. Her eyes too big to be real, her hair like her mom’s, a tiny sharp chin. Little teeth in her smile.

“Alright, alright!” I free up a hand and reach for the dice…

The dice hit the board. My phone dings. It’s Yours! “Fuck YES!”

Sara stares at me. “Why are you cursing?”

Amina stares too, but she’s amused. “Good news?”

“You rolled a seven.” Sara is back at the board, counting spaces with her fingers. She squeals when her finger touches the seventh space. “Park Place, Daddy! You owe me eleven hundred dollars.”

It was adorable the way she said it.

“Eleven hundred dollars.” It doesn’t sound the same when I say it. I can’t match her pitch, her inflection, her enthusiasm, her glee. I can’t be her.

I don’t have much. I’ve been playing with half my brain, too focused on… “I’m gonna be in a big movie, Little Winner. A big scary movie…” I fork over the remainder of my money. “I’m gonna play the killer!”

“You’re not a killer, dad. You’re too nice.”

“Am I?” I reach into the take-out box next to Amina and pull out the last shrimp bao.

“That’s mine.” Amina reaches for it.

“Too bad.” I put it in my mouth. “I’m a killer, babe.”

Pulled over in front of Hotel Figueroa, lost in time.

Sara is on the couch, looking down at me. She’s wearing a nightgown? Did she own a nightgown? I can’t remember. We’re running lines for a stupid commercial.

“What’s in your wallet?”

“Sillier, Daddy.” She’s laughing.

I can’t make out her face, a mess of smiles, eyes, and skin descends into a panic-inducing swirl. She’s gone. It’s gone.

Sillier, Daddy.

The memory slips entirely. I’m alone in the car. Smashmouth on the radio, Rockstar. I turn it off, hit my vape, but it doesn’t settle me.

The App dings. Its pink splash brightens the inside of my Kia. “Jayson” needs a ride. Black. Smiling guy. Photo on a beach. “Ugh.” Beach photo people never tip. Lower my window to vent the vape-smoke but take one more hit to get me through the ride. The city mellows. The brake-light sea up Figueroa from the arena is fine now. It’ll take me eight minutes to go three thousand feet to The Bloc where Jayson is waiting. I give it a moment, maybe get reassigned something in the other direction. Nope. Okay.

Ugh. No. I know him. He’s an asshole. Arrogant prick.

“Danny?” Jayson recognizes me, changes course and gets in the front seat. “I thought it might be you from your pic, but damn, man!” He jams his hand across the center console. His smile threatens to envelop me. I take his hand, dreading the bro-hug that’s going to follow. “How you been?”

“Alright, I guess.” ‘Jayson is Jayson Means. Years since I’ve seen him in person. Twenty maybe? But recently he’s everywhere on TV. Movies. “Not like you, man.” Fuck him. He’s king right now. Everywhere.

“Oooh…” he leans back in the seat, throws his hands behind the headrest and clasps them. He takes up all the space in the car. “I had myself a rough patch, though, believe me.” He turns to me. I pull into traffic. He’s going to Silver Lake. A house up above The Red Lion. The App wants me to take Hill to 2^nd. Makes sense. Twenty-two minutes. Too long. I won’t survive that long in a car with him. “After Master Class, I couldn’t buy a fucking role.” He chuckles. “Not like you, man. You just…” he makes a sound like a rocket, lifts his hand in a slow arc.

“Worked out great.” I haven’t done shit in the last eight years. “I got some stuff on the horizon, though.”

I see him look me up and down. “Good to hear. You deserve it.  I loved Venice Station. Lasted what? Like five years?” He barks a laugh and claps — “Network, too — some fucking residuals, man.”

He’s waiting for a response. I shrug. My last check was for $396.42. I smile for him. “Yeah.”

He sighs. “Tough when that shit ends, though. I had a rough patch myself. Got far down. Burned through all my Master Class money thinking thing’s’d pick up again, you know?”

“Yeah?” I know all too well. After Venice Station, a couple B movies, a few starrings, and then a collection of day-play five-and-unders until… nothing. Stupid fucking business.

Hill Street’s wide open. Time to destination drops by six minutes.

“Danny man,” I can feel him looking at me. “I worked at Gold’s Gym, got my personal trainer license. People used to recognize me, ask me to say my line when they did good.” He chuckles. “Reeee-dicyoulusssss.” Like he said on the show. “Three years ago I was on Cameo for twenty dollars a pop. It was saaaad…”

“Not anymore, though.” He’s everywhere.

“Nah,” he chuckles again. “Not anymore. Things are good.”

The tunnel under Bunker Hill makes things loud. He doesn’t try to talk over it. He was bad. Before. He was a bad actor — no depth, just looks and a schtick. Nothing going on underneath. Embarrassed me to be on the show with him. I was a lot better than him. Fuck this business.

But he’s good now. Impossibly good. “Been watching Manchester Square.”

He looks at me. “Yeah?”

“It’s good.”

“You think?”

“You’re good. Really good.” Brake lights at Glendale and Beverly.

“Thanks, man.” He’s looking me over again, weird expression. Thinking about something. Then: “You want to join me for a beer or two at the Lion? I haven’t talked with someone from the before-times in years, right.” He waits a moment. “I’m buying.” That smile again.

It’s 9:30. I need money but I’m suddenly tired. I shouldn’t. Shouldn’t drink. It’s a chance to talk myself onto Manchester. He’s a lead. He’s got pull. “Yeah.” I smile. “That’d be good.” I tap, “Last Ride.”

The Red Lion is a cop bar. Two of them recognize Jayson when we come in.

“Reeeeee-dickyoulussss!” One of them shouts. The other one laughs.

Another recognizes me. “You used to be Danny Ruiz!”

I hate it here. “Still am.”

They want a photo. “Manchester Square, man.” The older cop confides when the picture is done. “You ain’t fair to the LAPD on that show, you know. Makes it hard to respect you when you don’t respect us, my man.”

Jayson nods gravely. “I’ll bring it up with the writers.”

I’m drinking again. Oh well. It was a short sobriety. The beer loosens me, clears me like weed just doesn’t do. “Can I ask you something?”

Jayson’s looking over my shoulder at the cops. They’re loud, boisterous and menacing. “Yeah, what do you want to know?”

“Back in Master Class,” I hold my beer up to the light, then finish it off. “You were…”

“I was an asshole, man.” He shakes his head. Rueful. “Especially to you. Part of why I wanted to do this.” He leans in. “I owe you an apology.”

“For what?” Could be a hundred things. He treated me like shit.

“I knew how you felt about Katy, man. I knew but I…” he laughs, embarrassed. “You were better than me, man. I was scared of you so I always tried to put you down, keep you there, you know. I was a scared kid and you were better than me.” He shrugs elaborately. “I never felt good about any of it and I’ve wanted to say this to you for years.”

I don’t remember Katy. Who the hell was Katy? “It’s cool man.” The apology is nice. Unexpected. Maybe now he’ll get me on Manchester. “You were good, though.” It’s a lie.

“Bullshit, man. I sucked and you know it.”

“Yeah, no. We all sucked.”  He sucked more than the rest of us. “We were kids.” I tip my empty bottle at him. “But you are now. Good.”

“I am?” He’s being modest.

“Fuck you, Jayson, you know you are.”

He shrugs. Big smile. “Yeah. I got a lot better.”

“How? I mean, it’s like you got depth or something. I freaking believe you on screen and talking with you I just…”

He chuckles, disarming. Charming. “I learned some stuff, some good stuff. Things that changed me. Changed my life.” His smile changes. He leans in. Conspiratorial. “Gave me a leg up.”

Scientologist. It’s clear now. His big secret. His new success. “Wow!”

“What happened to you, then?” He leans back again, eyes the cops for a moment then back at me. “You were good and then you just…”

“This stupid town, man. After Venice Station, I was primed, you know? Ready. Then Josh talks me into doing some stupid trashy slasher shit that’s supposed to be the next Scream and it bombs, then he talks me into Stellar Ship and that bombs and I start to get the reputation, you know?” I’ve told this so many times. It’s sing-songy now, rote. “Josh tells me I’m poison because he made bad calls, then he drops me.” I sigh, wry smile. “Things are looking up, though. I got some things that might pop. Been writing. Some AD gigs, building my portfolio so I can direct TV, you know.” Don’t push too hard. “Love a chance to get back in front, though.”

“I do know.” He laughs, looks up and raises two fingers. I don’t turn around. “That’s awful, man. You deserved better. You were great on Venice Station.”

“I was a surfer-cop who solved beach crime.”

He smiles. “A good surfer-cop, though.”

More beer arrives.

“Let me see about getting you some time on Manchester, Danny — get you straight to producers for something recurring — we got a Latino neighbor coming up. They all love me there. I’ve got real pull.”

“You don’t have to,” but he has to. “That’d be amazing.” Hope. Fuck. Scientology. Oh well. Might be worth it. “Do you need me to go with you to get…” I’m so stupid. “Never mind.”

Jayson’s amused. He’s leering at me. “You think I’m a Scientologist.” He laughs. “I ain’t a fucking Scientologist, Danny.”

“You’re not?” I blurt it. I shouldn’t drink.

“You’re safe.” He lifts his beer. He’s still amused. Thank god.

“Then how’d you get so good? Whose class?”

He chuckles like he’s got a secret. “No class, man.”

“Then how?”

He shakes his head. “Can’t tell you.” He leans in, intimate. Whispers: “Not supposed to tell no-one.”

We drink. Talk about other things. What happened to so-and-so, do you remember how hot so-and-so was, did you actually fuck so-and-so in the costume trailer. Can’t stop thinking about how he got good.

It gets late. The cops filter out. “Don’t think about driving home, buddy,” one of them says to Jayson. “That’d be reeeee-dickyoulusss!” It gets laughs.

Jayson looks at me, then him. “Don’t worry, man, I got a Lyft.”

In the car, Jayson blocks the ignition with his hand. “Maybe we should sit a while.”

“Yeah.” We listen to music, talk more. I’m feeling alright. I’m actually liking Jayson. Still arrogant, but not a dick anymore. “So really, how’d you get so good? What’s the secret?”

He squints at me like he’s remembering something. “You’re married, right?”

“Was.” I don’t feel the whole weight like I normally do. I smile. Feels good to talk about it. “She left me.” He tenses. “Relax, it was years ago. I wasn’t my best self, you know? Things had gone bad. I don’t blame her.”

“That sucks, man.” He looks concerned, sympathetic. “Did you two have any kids?”

Fuck me. “Yeah.” Then: “No.” Then before I can stop it: “Not anymore.” It’s out. This wasn’t the plan. My eyes burn. My throat closes.

He bites his lip, his face creases like he’s screwed something up. “Dammit. I’m sorry, man. Sara, right? I totally forgot — she died? I wasn’t…”

I wave him off. Shake my head. The sadness won’t stop. Beer-loosened emotional sphincters give way. Grief. Ugh. Fuck. Sara. Sara. Jayson’s hand is on me. The warmth. I choke a little.

He pulls me close. “It’s cool, man. I got you.”

He’s strong, comforting. I give in to his hug. I’m crying a little. “Sorry.” I sit up, reach behind me for the tissues in the back seat and set about cleaning myself up.

I forgot about Sara.

“You knew about Amina? About Sara?”

He nods. “Yeah. I knew.” He sounds so sad. “Didn’t know what happened, though.”

“Who told you?”

He shrugs. “I don’t even know, man. Word got out. Danny’s got family, right?” He shakes his head. His sympathy is going to drown me. “I can’t even imagine how awful that must’ve been.”

“You don’t even know…” It’s a whisper. The blue glow from the dash blurs and Jayson’s hand is on my shoulder again. “No.” I clear my throat but it ends in a cough. “FUCK!” Hand to face, hard. Control. I breathe in. Got it. Good. “I’m fine, man. Most of the time.” He’s looking at me, eyeballs round with concern. “Some of the time.” I pull my vape up from the map-holder. “You mind?”

He doesn’t. Deep in. My psyche uncreases just a little bit. “It ruined me, man. I’m just done, you know? My career was already tanked by then anyways, so…” I shrug, because I don’t have the words. “People are supposed to get on with things, but I… I’m not. I can’t. I got nothing now. No family, no daughter, no career. I drive and smoke. I just want to go back, you know? Go back. Go back to when she was here, when I had Amina, back to when I had work. All of it. Go back.” I’m whining, nearly crying. “Jesus.” Another hit. It doesn’t help. “All night every night, all day every day, I stare at the goddamned ceiling and try to remember things. Things we did. Times we had.” I don’t know what I’m doing. I shouldn’t be saying all this.

Beer, weed, and kindness fuck me up every time.

Jayson isn’t saying anything. He’s looking at me. His expression is weird, conflicted. “What?”

He nods, just a little movement, like he’s made a decision.

“What?”

“You really want that, don’t you? To go back? One more game of Monopoly, eating bao with your wife and kid?”

Monopoly. Bao. Happiness. The wish is strong, rises like hope in my gut. Head shake, slow, with the wonder of imagined happiness. “Groundhog Day my ass right fucking then because I’m done here.” I turn to face Jayson square. “I wake up every day and wonder why I haven’t killed myself. I should. I should just do it.” I hold his eyes. “Stupid question.” I’m tired now. I want to go home. I reach for the ignition, then freeze. “How the fuck did you know about that?”

He shrugs, looks guilty.

“What?”

He sighs, deep. He’s still looking me in the eye. It’s uncomfortable. “You wanted to know what happened, how I got good. Can I tell you something? Like in confidence?”

“I couldn’t give less of a shit about your Artists Way journey right now, Jayson.”

“It’s related, man. I could help you. Just listen. It’s not anything you’ve heard before, I guarantee that. I can change your life. I know things. I’m not supposed to tell you, but I’m big now. There’s nothing they can do to me and after how I treated you on set, I feel like I owe you this.” He leans forward, close to me, intimate. His voice is a whisper. “You said you wanted to be in 2014? I can help make that happen.”

His insanity, his narcissism — they’re slaps. I face forward, hands on the wheel. “Fuck you. Get out of my car.”

“Listen.” I lean away, my head pressed against the window, yearning. “Three years ago, man, I was low. Low low. I had nobody. I was months behind in rent and the pandemic was just starting. It was bad.” He sighs. “I was sitting on my bed, holding my Glock and thinking hard about what came next when there was a knock on my door and this girl…” He shakes his head like what he’s about to say is crazy. “She came in and told me I had a choice. She offered me a different way and I took it and… it’s everything, man. It’s my secret — it’s my superpower, and it can help you, too.”

“You said you weren’t a Scientologist, man, get out of my car.”

“This ain’t about fucking Scientology.” He seems genuinely offended. “This isn’t anything like that. This is magic. You know how I knew about Sara? Amina? Monopoly and Bao? I was there, man. I saw it through my own goddamn eyes. That girl? She made me a patch-worker. I protect the integrity of the time-stream, man. I fix the past and it’s got real side-benefits that can help you.”

“Seriously, get the fuck out of my car before I hurt you.”

He doesn’t hear me. He’s ranting, relentless. “I’m not supposed to tell anybody, man, but I think I’ve got to tell you because I owe you that much for how much a dick I was.” I’ve got my head pressed so hard against the window it hurts. I close my eyes. I see spots. The door. I reach across myself. Open it. Stumble out. “Danny, man!” He’s coming after me. “Wait!”

My right foot catches on the lip. I stumble, catch myself, then sit on the pavement. “Leave me alone, man, just leave me alone.”

“I’m telling you real shit. She hooked me up. I work for Time now.” He’s kneeling next to me, leaning close above my ear. His voice burns. “I fix holes in the past — lost memories. I go back in time and fill in the goddamned blanks — it’s how I got so good man. I don’t have to wonder what it’s like being other people. I don’t have to play the truth of imaginary situations. I’ve been other people. I’ve been you, man.” His hand on my shoulder. “Several times.”

“Stop.” It’s a whisper. “Please just stop.”

He won’t. He’s smiling, maniacal. “I rolled the seven that landed you on Park Place where Sara had three houses. I ate the last shrimp dumpling that Amina wanted. I felt that, man. I have been a thousand people in a thousand different lives now and so can you. I can talk to that girl again, man. I can hook you up and maybe you can go back, live that moment, too.” He’s leaning over me again. Tender eyes. Intensity. “Very least you’ll get to be other people, too, help your career, maybe help you in general.”

“You’re fucking insane.” But he’s not. He’s sane. I had rolled a seven. I had eaten the last shrimp dumpling. Amina had wanted it.

He shakes his head slowly. “I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone, man, so you can’t tell anyone, either, okay? Next time I see the girl, I’ll talk to her for you, though. I promise.”

I look up at him. His face is open. He’s earnest, honest. “You go back in time…”

“Yeah. Not like some movie sci-fi shit, though. One moment I’m me now and the next moment I’m Sally Archer in Omaha, Nebraska, in 2017 trying to decide which canned soup to buy at Dollar General and wondering if I should leave my husband, and then I’m back to being me.”

“Man…” It’s insane. What if it’s real?

“I swear it’s true.” He looks so earnest. “We’re the people who keep time from getting fucked up. Sometimes things don’t get stored right — things happen but then they get erased so they both happen and didn’t happen at the same time and that can really fuck things up. We go back and re-live the lost moments.  That’s why I’ve been you, man. You keep erasing things.”

It’s not real. I stand up. “You’re such an asshole, Jayson.”

He stays where he was. I watch him watch me drive away. He looks scared. I can’t shake the feeling.

Morning. I think. Light anyways. The vertical blinds in my bedroom are useless. My head hurts. My back, too. Last night’s memories filter in. Slowly. I rolled a seven.

“Fuck.” It’s a whisper, raspy, forced through phlegm. I screwed up my chance for a recurring on Manchester. I feel sick.

Toast, peanut butter, coffee. Consider my day. Drive, I guess. Amina wanted the bao. I should have let her have it. Maybe if I’d let her have it, I’d…

Fuck I’m hungry.

My apartment is gone. I’m…

The Gas’n’Save looks bright and cheery inside. 

I’m being painted over, hidden.

I’m Jimmy Dammaker. 

It’s winter-bright, sun-shiny. I’m in Akron, Ohio. It’s four days before my ex-wife’s birthday. She’s a bitch who took my kids. I need twenty-five dollars in the next few hours or it’s going to be a rough fucking night. 

It’s not me. It’s Jimmy. I’m Jimmy.

The shelves inside are colorful, filled with friendly food. I’ve got four dollars and seventeen cents, but I need that. More. It’s cold. I’m sweating. Not good. The Indian who owns the station kicked me off the property this morning, but he’s not here now. Just the girl.

I walk up slow-like. Casual. I’m beside the door. The wind picks up, blows my coat open. It’s cold as a motherfucker, but my hands, my back, my face feel shiny. 

There’s an older guy getting out of his car, fat and weak. Polo shirt under his coat, khaki pants. The kind who carries cash. “Hey man! Hey, you got a sec, man?”

He won’t look at me.

“I’m a fucking vet, man. You’re gonna walk right past me like you don’t see me? I served for you, asshole.” I didn’t, but I’m mad now anyways. Fuck this guy. I’m jonesing. Hard. “Give me some money, you pussy.”

The girl inside is wide-eyed scared, hand on her phone. The guy in the polo shirt slows. “You need to leave.” He won’t even look at me.

“Give me twenty bucks, then.”

His step stutters. “Here.” He pulls his hand from his pocket, holds out a five. “Go.”

My hand is halfway to my mouth. Jimmy Dammaker is still in me, memories that feel like mine but aren’t. A house with a big lawn, fist-holes in a wall, a twelve-foot python named Sofie. Sadness that feels like anger. He’s slipping away, but he leaves a sheen of himself behind in me.

My toast reaches my lips. I bite instinctively, but I have no saliva. The bread sits in my mouth unlubricated and unpleasant. I spit it into the trash.

I pulled Jayson’s number from the app. His phone rings a bunch before it’s answered. “Who’s calling, please?”

It’s not Jayson. Maybe an assistant. “This is Danny. Ruiz. Can I talk to Jayson?”

“What’s your relationship with Jayson?” The guy on the phone sounds too old to be an assistant. Professional. Suspicious.

“We’re friends, man. We were drinking last night. Can I talk with him?”

The voice changes. Harder. “You were with Mr. Means last night? At his house?”

“No man, at the Red Lion. What the hell?” My head is pounding. I’m starting to feel sick.

“Mr. Ruiz, my name is Detective Rafael Luna, LAPD. Would it be alright if I sent someone over to talk with you?”

Jayson is dead. Beaten to death in his home. They ask me about baseball bats, whether we fought. I tell them the truth. When they leave: “We might have more questions, so please keep yourself available.”

After the door closes, I vomit into the sink, spare sausage from last night, bile, water. It burns.

I collapse on a chair, put my head in my hands.

A knock. Solid, confident, a set of three raps. Moments later, three more. I should get it, but I can’t move my hands, my head. “Just a minute.” I pinch my cheek hard. The pain brings me out.

“Sorry, I was in the bathroom.” It’s a woman I don’t know. “Who are you?”

She’s in her thirties, maybe my age exactly. A little heavy but wearing it well. Her hair is thick, teased and messy, reminds me of Jennifer Finch from L7 back in the day. Clean jeans, a black tee, black Chuck Taylor’s. Pretty but scary. “Hi Danny,” she says. She smiles, but it doesn’t touch the rest of her face. “Can I come in?” She pushes past me. “Thank you.”

I stay at the door, watch her scan my living room. It’s been a long time since anyone who wasn’t me has seen it. I imagine what she sees and blanch. “Sorry. Who are you?”

“My name’s Darby.” She turns to face me. She smiles again, then motions me to the couch. “Have a seat, Danny.” She sits on the far side, angles herself to look at me. “I was a friend of Jayson’s. We need to talk.”

I can’t sit down. I stay standing, arms crossed, between her and the door. “You know about… It was you, wasn’t it? The girl who talked to him, told him about Time and whatever. What did you do to him? He didn’t do anything, man. He was trying to help me.”

She laughs, for real. It’s at me. “Danny. there wasn’t anything me or anyone else could do to keep Jayson from dying once he broke the rules.” She widens her eyes at me, like I should understand. “He told you. He shouldn’t have done that.”

“But none of this is real.” I don’t even believe myself anymore. “Was it? Is it? It wasn’t. That’s stupid.”

“Okay.” She stares up at me, dead-faced.

It deflates me. “Fuck.”

She glances at her watch. “Jayson broke the rules and was sent to patch a death. You are now a patch-worker because it was either that or kill you because Jayson was an idiot and told you.” She widens her eyes, leans forward. “Rules.”

She lays it out. Just like Jayson.  “You’re gonna fix Time, Danny.”

It’s heady. Patching is re-creating a forgotten moment, a piece of time. It takes a while for the past to solidify. Most moments are strong, sticky, built to last, but others don’t set right. Others get erased.  She gives me an example: “Imagine you buy blueberries at the store and pay six bucks — if that moment disappears from Time, then you ate blueberries that you didn’t buy, someone else might buy blueberries that don’t exist and the shopkeeper is six bucks short while you have six extra you already spent. We go back and relive that moment, make sure it sticks.” 

“I don’t…” It’s a lot.  My head hurts.

“Don’t get lost in the whys and wherefores, Danny.” She wrinkles her nose, shakes her head. “More things on heaven and earth and all that. Just know you’re saving the world.” She shrugs. “If those paradoxes make it to the present, Time’s fucked. We’re all fucked. We keep that from happening.”

As she leaves, I ask my only question. “What rules? What are the rules?” I don’t want to die like Jayson.

“Fight Club, Danny.” Darby smiles as she stands up to go. “The rules are Fight Club rules.”

Donnie Gleason. It’s 2016. Richmond, Indiana. I’m wide. Tall, too. My skin beads with sweat. My hair is hot on my head. It’s hot. Can’t believe I still live here. You ain’t leaving, Donnie. Too fucking scared. I tighten inside, shameful. Speedway has twenty-five pumps, but the one I chose is out of regular. I scan the lot, consider getting back in the car to move to a different island, but it seems like too much. It’s too hot. The Purina factory is making the whole town smell like dog food again. Seattle doesn’t smell like this. How the fuck would I know. 

I slap the button for premium. It’s twenty cents more.

“Fuck.” Nobody’s listening. Nobody cares.

Patches come randomly, no warning. I’m here, signaling left, third in line for the turn and then suddenly I’m Jaden Preble helping my sister buy a dress for her eighth-grade prom and I’m mad she hasn’t even said thank-you even though I could have spent the day playing Call of Duty. Then I’m back but I don’t remember where I am or what I was doing and everybody gets pissed at me while I puzzle it out.

She should have thanked him, though.

Patching. Inconvenient, but not awful. Sometimes good. I feel what they feel. I’ve been thrilled about finding twenty bucks when I was Emmett Combs, a bricklayer in Evanston, Illinois in 2015. I’ve felt schadenfreude as Connor Fields in Klamath Falls when Caden Brooks got busted for vaping in the bathroom. I’ve felt the sadness of Alberto Mendez of Massapequa when his favorite pair of socks were too worn to keep.

There are downsides, too. Something happens to me there, it happens to me.

Eric Bledsoe. Truckee. 2018. Driving, barely thinking, thinking. Not thinking.

“Not…” words are weird. Sounds. Mindblowing. Moving air makes music. Moving air.      “Blah blah blah blah” means something but it’s just air.

Laughing now. Can’t help it. It’s snowing a little, still September. Weird. Brake lights in front of me. I feel lazy. Moving slow, foot from gas to brake.

Not going to make it. No panic. No worry. Just is. I turn the wheel, slide onto the shoulder, then over the shoulder… over the shoulder sounds… more sounds.

The car bumps, then we’re riding a bucking bronco, up down up up up up down down. Stop.

“We’re okay!” I tell myself. I’m the only one listening. My nose hurts.

I had a bloody nose after that one. Back and neck sore for a week. Jayson died like that, being someone else when they got killed. He was trying to help. Wanted to give me my career back, give me a chance to see Sara again. I think about Jayson a lot. Beaten to death. A bat, maybe something else. Found in his living room, wearing boxer-briefs and a robe. The robe didn’t have any blood on the outside, no blood anywhere but on his body. Reddit’s got a sub now, r/meansmurder. People think he was killed elsewhere.

Not elsewhere. Elsewhen. Sent to patch a death.

Most patches are small. Moments in time easily forgotten — choices made doing laundry, whether to buy tomatoes.  People worry. People care. People are scared. People have joy. Patching is making it harder to judge people.

Then there are erasures, moments people remember into oblivion. People like me. We are memory destroyers.

Paula Robinson. The Anasazi Steakhouse is fancy. Caleb’s choice. He’s across from me, eyes down, intent on his rib-eye. He cuts it carefully, fork in his left hand, backside up, tines in the meat. His manners are so good. He’s refined. People would never know if they saw him at work or driving on the freeway in his beat up ancient green Tundra.

“This is nice.” I feel myself flush. I sound simple. “I’ve never been here before.”

Caleb looks up. He’s chewing, but it’s subtle, quiet. His eyes are bright. His face, he has a look. Everything about him is slightly wrong — his nose is too large, crooked, too. His eyes too deep. His goatee isn’t full, his cheeks are hollow but the whole thing together looks… good. He’s like a younger Sam Elliot. He smiles. “Couldn’t think of another place where I could take you and people wouldn’t think I was too cheap for my date.”

I’ve been here as Paula three times already. Something must’ve happened to Caleb. She must really miss him. Erasures like hers and mine are always tragic nostalgia.

Every time I fade, splash down inside a mind somewhere else in time, I hope it’s mine — that moment where I rolled a seven. Some other moment of joy with Amina, with Sara. I drill down on memories daily, forcing moment-by-moment replays until the faces dissolve and the moments drown in murkiness and I’m not even sure it happened at all.

If they’re sending patchworkers, they’re not sending me.

But Jayson was right. While I’m patching I am them. I feel them, think them, know them. It’s real. I don’t have to play at imaginary truths anymore.

“You want back in.” Josh sounds skeptical.

We haven’t talked in four years.  Last time we did he told me my only options were reality. Screw that. If my career was going to end, it wasn’t going to be sitting across the desk from whoever-the-fuck replaced Donald Trump on Celebrity Apprentice or whatever.

“I’m ready. I’ve spent real time focusing on craft. I’ll impress you, man. I’ll impress everybody.”

He tells me I don’t need to impress him. He wants a new headshot. “You haven’t updated your webpage.”

“I’ll have it all by Tuesday.” Hang up. Lean back, close my eyes. Another moment with Sara. I focus, remember it hard.

The concrete path to our front door in South Pasadena. Amina is on the porch. She’s radiant, watching us. I’m holding Sara’s hand. The sun is hot. She’s looking up at me. She’s smiling. “The baby muskrat!” She says. She’s telling me about Wonder Pets.

I can hear her voice. It’s everything. Her face blurs, the house, the path, the heat, the voice, they fray, degrade into swirled flashes of colors.

Somebody will get to patch that. Probably not me.

Headshots and web-service are expensive, but Venice Station residuals check came in yesterday. $433.89. Bigger than expected. If I don’t pay rent I can swing it.

“You booked it, man!” Josh.

The call woke me from a sound sleep. “I did? That’s great!” I don’t know which part he’s talking about. I’ve sent in tapes for more than a dozen in the last few weeks. “Which one?”

“The recurring, man! Sunset Emergency!”

“Really?” I smile. Channeled Dr. Ahmet Pour for that one. I was Ahmet for three minutes while he sat on the toilet and thought about calling his wife. We didn’t. There was too much to talk about and not enough time. We both knew he wasn’t calling because he was afraid. “That’s awesome.” My superpower. Jayson. “Thanks, man.” I didn’t used to thank Josh. Didn’t used to thank anybody, I guess, but people need to hear it.

Off the phone. Jayson was right. Don’t even have to rehearse. Shit’s just there.

Jayson.  “Thanks, man.” I touch my heart, bring my fingers to my lips, and then raise them to the sky.

“You’re doing it on purpose.” Darby showed up at my door unannounced. We’re sitting on the couch. “You’ve got to stop.”

She’s intense. I want to meet her eyes, but I look at my coffee instead. “I’m not…”

“You want to see them again, I get it, but it’s not going to happen.” She sets her water bottle on the table. It lands firmly, with a clack against the glass that startles me. “We don’t patch ourselves.”

“Why not?” My voice betrays my panic.

“It just doesn’t happen, Danny.” She sounds sympathetic, sad, like I’m a child. “You have to stop.”

I shake my head. I’m not going to answer. She waits. I wait longer.

She gets up, lifts her bottle from the table. “I’m serious, Danny. You need to stop. You’re creating work for other people and it’s never going to get you what you want.”

I don’t look up.

“Daddy?” Sara just got her uniforms, ugly gray polos, blue polyester pants. She’s standing in the doorway, silhouetted by the setting sun behind her from the open patio doors. There’s jasmine in the air…

She stands to leave but pauses at the open door. “I’m serious, man. This is serious.”

Sara does a spin. “I’m modelling!” She spins again.

“Gorgeous, Little Winner!” It’s ugly, but she’s amazing. I’m smiling. Happy.

When I look up, Darby’s gone.

In line at Lassen’s, basket full of fruit and meat. People look at me as I shop. They recognize me. The girl staring from the cross-aisle by the coffee, the guy by the meat counter.

I hear my name. I smile, pretend not to have overheard. It’s been years. Decades. They know me. Sunset Emergency is big. My character’s arc is airing currently. There’ve been interviews — “Phoenix from the ashes” sort of things.

“Hey man.” Guy behind me. I turn around, smile.

“What’s up?”

He points to the front of the store. “Register’s open.”

Still awake. Still in bed. Sheets are too warm. Blanket’s too much. I feel damp.

Amina is standing beside the bed, pulling off her shirt to put on her nightgown. She’s telling me about something that happened at Sara’s daycare, something about what another parent said or did. I’m not really listening, watching her breasts, waiting for her to take off her pants.

“Mom?” The door bursts open. Sara’s there, all smiles until she sees Amina clutching her shirt to her chest. Her eyes go wide. “Were you having sex?”

Again.

Amina is standing beside the bed, pulling off her shirt…

The image is blurring. Amina’s skin, face, hair, muddling into blotches. Her voice slips, becoming simple unspoken words in my brain. She’s being erased. She’ll need a patch.

Jayson lied. It won’t ever be me.

Bestia. Josh’s choice. “We gotta celebrate!” He just bought a new condo in the old Parker Paints building. He’s high on the Arts District and wants to share it.

Bestia’s fine. Good food. The agency’s picking up the tab with the Marvel money I’m about to bring in. We’re sitting by the big windows in front, visible from the street for obvious reasons. People aren’t staring, but I still feel eyes while I eat flatbread and tapenade.

“Danny?”

She’s standing beside me, snuck up without me noticing. She was always quiet. She’s dressed well, but I recognize the loose long dress that cinches at the waist. She bought it when we were still together. It’s frayed at the hem, a little faded. The tailored black cardigan hides it. She’s lost weight. Her hair is swept back into a loose knot. There’s gray in it.

I don’t know what to say. I stare until the discomfort of silence overrides surprise, overrides the ache she brings. “Amina… hi.” I gesture across the table. “You remember Josh.”

“Hi Josh.” She smiles. It’s hollow. Her cheeks are hollow. She’s hollow. She’s a gutted version of herself, a taxidermy like me. To me: “How’ve you been?”

I shrug. I ache. I’m hollow, too. I’m sorry. You left me. She’s dead. I’m dead. “Okay, I guess. Career’s picking up again which is cool, but…” another shrug. “How are you?”

“I’m…” She shrugs. Her eyes turn hard, the look she had after Sara whenever she looked at me. I wilt. “I’m surviving.” She turns, looks back at someone or something. “I just saw you over here and didn’t want to leave without at least saying hi.”

I stand. “Hey, maybe we…”

She shakes her head, smiles again. Sad. Still hollow. “No, Danny. I don’t think I hate you anymore but this is all I can handle, okay?”

Maybe before I might’ve forced the issue. Not anymore. Too much of other people’s pain in me to prioritize my own anymore. Sitting down again, watching her walk up Traction with another woman. They look back, but I can’t tell if it’s at me or the restaurant. Josh is speaking, saying something. Enthusiastic.

She still thinks I let Sara die. I want to die.

Sara. She’s standing in vomit outside my bedroom door. I’m etching it into my mind. Every moment, every color, sound. Erasing.

“I threw up.” Her voice is soft. She’s holding her head. She’s so small. She’s sad. “My head really hurts.” Then: “I’m sorry I made a mess.” She’s clear, then she’s not. For moments I see her face as it was, but then it degrades, disappears. Needing a patch.

“No worries, Little Winner.” I step over the puddle. The smell is acrid, awful. Bile. Vomit usually makes me want to vomit, but hers doesn’t. It’s just a mess to clean. Weirdly undisgusting. “You want some Tylenol?” It’s the moment before the worst moment of my life. If they won’t give me this, they won’t give me anything.

“Yes, please.”

That vomit stayed for days.

“Just over there,” Cassidy gestures at the hill across Sunset. She’s twenty-four, been in LA for two years and now she’s Daimeon to my Ghost Rider. She’s pointing at her apartment. “I might move, though.” She shrugs, twirls her drink. “I want to stay in the neighborhood but my apartment is…” She makes a face. Some fans are pissed she’s a girl. Incels and losers.

We’re good together, on screen. She’s okay but together, chemistry. “It’s a good area.” I don’t know what else to say. It’s true. Echo Park is nice.

Daddy? I threw up. I take a breath.

“Are you liking Beachwood?” The show is coming together nicely.

“Only been there four months, but so far it’s fine…” On set, I get to be Johnny Blaze more than I have to be Danny Ruiz. It’s a relief, being someone else consistently. Not one-offs. Even Ronnie Suarez on Sunset Emergency wasn’t as all-encompassing.

But at the end of the day, I still go home.

Cassidy’s eyes move off me, up. Something behind me. “Hey Danny.”

Darby. She’s not alone, standing with a tall lanky Black guy who reads gay. I shift on my stool. “Hi.”

“I’m Darby,” Darby puts her hand out to Cassidy. “I’m a friend of Danny’s.” She points to her companion. “This is Alex. Alex, Danny and…” She cocks her head in Cassidy’s direction.

“Cassidy.” Cassidy tells her. “It’s nice to meet you!” She looks around as if trying to find a pair of stools to pull up to our counter at the window. “There’re no…”

Darby shakes her head. “No worries, we can’t stay. Can I steal Danny for a sec?”

Outside. Alex has stayed with Cassidy. I can see them talking. Laughing. “You brought muscle this time.”

“Alex is not muscle, Danny. Alex is just a friend like us.” She shifts herself, putting her body between me and the window where Alex and Cassidy sit. “You’ve got to stop, Danny. I told you it was serious. Don’t fuck with things you don’t understand.”

“You’re telling me to stop remembering my daughter. You shouldn’t fuck with things you cannot understand.”

“I’m just the messenger. I’m trying to save your life. Erasures like yours, they endanger Time and they won’t have any compunctions about stopping you permanently if need be.” She leans in. “If you keep at it, you’ll end up on a death patch, just like Jayson.” She looks honestly concerned. “Please.” Then: “You’ve built a good life, Danny. Love what you have, look forward not back okay?”

I look past her at Cassidy. A good life. Daddy? Maybe. In some ways. It’s not enough. It will never be enough. I nod, let go the breath I didn’t know I’d held. “Yeah. Alright.”

It’s later. We’re still at the bar across from Cassidy’s. Lights are bright. Noises loud. My cheeks are warm. Cassidy is laughing.

“Can I ask you something?” She leans forward. “Something serious?”

“Sure.”

“It might be rude.” She shakes a finger at me. “I don’t like being rude, but I really want to know.”

“Ask. I won’t be offended, I promise.”

“Okaaayyy.” She sits up straight. “I was watching Master Class and a little of Venice Station…”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“We’re working together. I wanted to see.” She sighs. “Anyways, I was watching and… I work with you and you’re like… you’re amazing now but then you…”

“I wasn’t very good.” I chuckle. I wasn’t very good. Jayson’s words. “I know.”

“What happened? How did you get so good?”

“I just…” I shrug. “I learned some stuff, you know.”

“You took classes?” She squints at me. “Playhouse West or something? Studio 5? It’s just… I’m not very good.”

“Cassidy, you’re good.” It’s a little bit of a lie. She’s cute and she’s got charisma but she’s not good. I lift my beer to my lips to hide my shame. She could be good.

“Bullshit. I’m cute. I won’t be cute forever and I want to be good. I want to have staying power. How’d you do it?”

Staying power. I’ve got staying power now. I’m big again. I’ve got the nice place, the career. Daddy? I couldn’t care less. It’s your turn! Cassidy is watching me, waiting. I can give her what she wants. Patching made me a better actor. A better person, maybe. It didn’t give me what I wanted. Maybe it will for her. Maybe she’ll be happy. “You really want to know?” Daddy?

“Seriously, Danny!” She pushes my leg.

“It’s a big dark secret, Cass.” I raise my eyebrows, take a sip. “Life and death.” Park Place, Daddy!

“Tell me!” Eleven hundred dollars!

I sip my beer. It tastes good. The evening light is perfect. I’ll miss this. “I really shouldn’t, but okay…”

I have two of Sara’s uniform shirts left in my closet. I take one. It’s very small. I raise it to my face, but it only smells like soap. I bring it with me to the couch.

A hit from my vape. I wait in silence.

Fight Club Rules. “Anytime now.” I wait. Nothing.

Until.

He’s not coming. “Daddy!”

I’m not me. I’m her.

My head. The noise.

Oh god.

The door opens and he’s there. I can’t look up at him. At me. “I threw up.”  He doesn’t look mad. “My head really hurts.” I look around. The vomit. The mess. I feel bad. “I’m sorry I made a mess.”

“No worries, Little Winner.” He’s smiling. He looks tired. He’s got no shirt. His hair is messy. “You want some Tylenol?” He looks around. “I’ll get this cleaned up later.”

 He takes my hand. I can barely see it. Things are dark now, blurry. “Daddy?”

“What’s up, Winner?”

“My eyes are weird.” My head hurts. A lot lot lot.

He chuckles. It relaxes me. He’s not worried. “Let’s see. Headache? Barfing? Weird eyes?” He lifts me onto the couch and sits down next to me. He’s warm. He’s comfortable. Daddy. “Sounds like you’ve got a migraine, Winner.” He leans forward, looks me in the face. “I used to get them, too. They suck.”

I laugh. It hurts. It’s hard to see. I… more vomit. Dad sees it coming. Catches it with a popcorn bowl.

I’m soooo tired. My eyes.

My head…

It hurts… “Daddy?” It hurts so much. “Where’s mommy?”

“She’s in Houston, remember? Work. She’ll be back tomorrow.”

I want her to be here. I want to see her. My head hurts so much. “I’m scared.”

“Don’t be, Winner. It’s just a migraine.”

I can barely hear him. Through a tube, a long long way away. It’s so dark.

Am I dying?

It’s not a migraine, Little Winner. It’s an aneurysm. I’m so sorry.

It’s dark.

I love you so much.

A long time. Our hearts beat.

I’m so sorry.

Then slow. Beat again. Once.

We’re together. In silence.

I was waiting in line somewhere and scrolling when I saw that she was tagged in a post by Mr. Walker, my high school principal. The post said that it was with great sadness that Mr. Walker had to announce that Ms. Brown had been found dead, stab wounds covering various parts of her body. I remember being sad but also a little confused about why Mr. Walker was the one posting it. It didn’t seem like they had been all that close when I was in high school though I supposed that I didn’t know a whole lot about their lives that way or the other. I didn’t like Mr. Walker all that much, so I didn’t reply or react.

Imagine my surprise when, later that day, Ms. Brown posted an inspirational quote. At first, I assumed that someone close to her had taken over the account and had wanted to cheer up people who were hearing about her brutal death. But then people responded to her, and she responded back to them, and the replies sounded like Ms. Brown. I looked up Mr. Walker’s profile because I was going to tell him that I didn’t think his joke was funny at all. When I looked him up, not only did I no longer see the post about Ms. Brown, but I also found an announcement that Mr. Walker had died nearly a year ago, and that this was now a legacy account. There was something about celebrating his life rather than dwelling on the circumstances of his death, but nothing all that concrete. I looked at the profile pic, and it looked a little off. I couldn’t exactly explain how, but his face seemed unreal. I decided that I must have just not remembered how Mr. Walker looked and went back to scrolling.

I thought for sure that I’d gone crazy, wondering why I thought that I’d seen that post in the first place. I thought about sending Ms. Brown a message; not telling her about the post, but just seeing how she was. I decided that it would be weird, so I just let it go. Fast forward a few more days, and I start seeing posts from people I went to high school with, talking about how awful it was that Ms. Brown had been murdered. When I looked at the news from my hometown, I found that she’d been killed exactly how Mr. Walker’s account had described. I thought about reaching out to the police, but what could I say? I didn’t take a screenshot of the post or anything (I didn’t think that I’d had to), and I felt like if I did come forward, the police would likely start looking at me.

I donated a little money to her memorial fund, and I tried to mostly forget about it though I did check the news for updates. Police had no real leads; there was no physical evidence. They didn’t even have a murder weapon, and nobody had been seen coming into or leaving her place. There was a lot of rumor and speculation (I come from a small town, and a murder like that is very big news), but nobody could come up with anything concrete.

A few months later, I saw a second post from Mr. Walker. This time it was a decent (but not star) football player. He hadn’t lived in our hometown for over a decade from what I could tell. This time, Mr. Walker’s profile claimed that the kid had died in a car accident. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t send him a message saying “a Facebook ghost is going to kill you,” but I didn’t want to just let it hang, either.

I sent the kid (though he was an adult like me by now) a quick message: “Don’t know why, but you popped into my head the other day. How are things with you?” I looked at his profile pic. His eyes were wrong. I’m not sure what the opposite of sparkling is, but that’s what his eyes were doing. They were like two black holes that you couldn’t quite focus on but that you could feel the light getting sucked into.

The kid didn’t answer my message. I didn’t really blame him; it must have seemed weird that he was getting a message from some random dude from high school. Or maybe he never even checked his messages. I knew people who went months without checking their messages. Either way, it wasn’t long before I saw that he had crashed into a tree. Officials suspected drunk driving. That was possible, but it was too big of a coincidence for me. I had no clue why a Facebook ghost would want to fuck with me. I’d never been on Mr. Walker’s radar as far as I could tell. I checked his profile again. This time, his picture was a cluster of houseflies that looked vaguely like a face. I closed my browser and rubbed my eyes. It had to be a hallucination.

That night, I went into a couple of Facebook groups from my hometown, seeing if there was any chatter that suggested anyone else was seeing this. There was some weird shit, for sure (an argument about whether this one bar had been on Elm Street or Pine Street), but nothing that made me think that anyone else saw Mr. Walker’s ghost posts. Though maybe, like me, they didn’t want to put themselves out there. I didn’t want to spend too much time searching, either, in case someone eventually came looking through my history.

Four more months went by, and I started to feel like maybe things were okay. But then Ms. Brown tagged Mr. Walker in a post that said that this old hall monitor, Mr. Edwards, had died in a hunting accident. This time I took a screenshot. I tried looking up Mr. Edwards, too, seeing if I could try to give him some kind of hint or suggestion. But I found that this time, it wasn’t a warning, the death had already happened. Police treated it as an accident like with the football player, but that couldn’t be true.

I logged out of Facebook and stayed off for weeks. Every now and then, I looked at the screenshot, wondering if I should delete it or who I could possibly reach out to. I decided to look into Mr. Walker. Maybe there was something in his death that would tell me what to expect. What I found at first was that he had died alone in his apartment of natural causes. I thought about how to find out what the actual story was, but again, it was hard to reach out to anyone without leaving tracks. Would I call a coroner or something?

Instead, I called my parents, mainly just to hear their voices. My dad answered the phone, and we talked a little bit about fishing and the Packers’ chances for the coming season. It was only a few minutes before he handed me off to my mom. She talked a bit more about the town. After a few more minutes, she said, “You sound sad.”

“Homesick, maybe,” I said.

“You’re always welcome to come back, Honey.”

I’m not sure why that caught me off guard, but it did. Maybe part of my brain had figured out that I wanted to see my hometown again, see if I could get a feel for the ghost, and that part of my brain told my conscious mind to call my parents. And so I decided to head home. I was in the airport, waiting for my plane (delayed half an hour), when temptation got the better of me and I went back on Facebook. The very first post was from Mr. Walker with a bunch of replies. The strange thing was that it didn’t seem to talk about a death. Mr. Walker’s post was “The kids may go on their way, but they never stop being a Wildcat.” The replies varied from “so true” to “go wildcats!” to “we’re with you Mr. W!”. And they were from tons of profiles, many of them were people I’d never heard of. Some of their pictures were yellowed, with old-timey clothes. One was nothing but maggots, moving. Another was a pile of rotting meat. I logged out again.

The whole plane ride home, I expected to die. A plane crash, a hijacking, anything would have made total sense to me. But I made it to Chicago, through O’Hare, and to my hometown without dying. My parents were both there, waiting for me. We hugged, I took a leak at the airport, and we drove home. Mom had made a roast which was delicious. As we ate, I asked, “Has anything weird been going on in town?”

My mom frowned. “Weird how?”

“I don’t know, like, weird chatter around town. Like about Ms. Brown, for instance.”

My mom looked down, and my dad looked up. Eventually, he said, “They keep saying they can’t say anything. At first, we thought that it was because they were closing in on someone and didn’t want to tip their hand, but, by now, we figure that they just really don’t know anything.”

I shook my head. “That’s awful.”

“It is awful,” my mom said. She went on a short monologue about everything Ms. Brown did for the community. I knew a lot of it, but there were a few new pieces of information. I didn’t know that she’d volunteered at the animal shelter after she had retired. Ms. Brown had never posted about it. I nodded and ate. I wondered if someone’s death was being posted to Facebook as I ate.

After dinner, I helped with dishes, thanked my parents for everything, and headed to bed. Before I went to sleep, I did log on. Instead of a specific death announcement, there was an image of several dead bodies, totally unrecognizable. One was a pile of dismembered limbs. Another was a badly charred person. Another was a body whose head was beneath the wheel of a car. Each one had gotten a heart reaction from Mr. Walker and comments from other people. I shivered, closed my browser and turned off my phone. I stared at the ceiling for a while before I was able to drift off to sleep. When I did fall, I had dreams that I couldn’t remember but that I knew were awful. When I woke up, I went downstairs, rubbing my eyes.

My mom and dad were talking quietly. When they noticed me, my mom came to me and hugged me. She was crying. My dad told me that an apartment building in town had caught fire. Dozens of people had burned alive. I hugged her back.

We had a quick breakfast and then picked up some supplies to drop off with the few survivors. When we got home, my mom took a nap, and my dad and I went for a walk. He asked me, “Why did you ask about weird stuff? About whether weird things were going on or not?”

I thought about it for a second. “There’s been some weird stuff on social media. It’s kind of hard to explain because it’s not threats that I can report or anything, but I don’t know. It just makes me wonder if there’s some common root to all the awful stuff that’s been happening.”

“But you don’t know anything.”

I sighed. “Dad, the longer I live, the more I know that I don’t know a single thing.”

My dad patted me on the shoulder, then he side-hugged me. When we got back to our house, I asked to lay down for a little while. I went back on Facebook and scrolled for a little bit. It took me a while, but eventually, I saw that my whole family was doomed. There was a series of posts celebrating my parents and me. There wasn’t a specific announcement about how we’d die, but I couldn’t see us not dying after the kind words.

I got up and went down to the kitchen. My dad was watching sports clips on the iPad. I wanted to tell him that he should do something great with the last moments of his life. But he was happy watching sports, and I couldn’t explain to him that he should be a saint before he was murdered in some untold way. “Dad,” I said.

“Yeah,” he looked at me.

“I love you and Mom.”

He smiled but kind of shook his head. “We love you too. Always.” I looked at him, and, over his shoulder, I saw out the window. There was something tall and moving. Its skin was an amalgam of scales, worm skin, exposed flesh and exoskeleton. Every place I looked, it was something terrible but different. I tried to smile for my dad, then I turned away.

I headed to the living room. My mom was reading. She looked up and smiled at me. It was a simple gesture, but I really did appreciate the sign of connection. I went to her and hugged her. I held her for a long time. When I let her go, I was ready for the end. I knew that it would happen, and I was actually at peace with it.

There was some scratching from outside. “Do you hear that?” my mom asked.

“Hear what?” I asked, hoping to stave off the horror as much as I could until all that was left of us was pictures of corpses and the intangible comments of people we hadn’t actually seen in forever.

I know someone who’s bought an actual axe and a lightsaber
just in case the virus mutates to T-form and we wake up to zombie neighbours.
We already know the only way to handle a zombie, don’t we?
Off with the head!

Conjurors? Premonitors? Seers? Or cautionaries?
Travellers.
I wonder which time dimension these storytellers came from.

As a child, I believed walls to be cross-dimensional gateways.
I was scared of putting my feet on the floor, ‘cause my brother always told me,
Hands from under the bed will grab little Anna’s legs.
Driven wild by imagination, even Dante’s banished souls reached out to pull me into the hellhole through the pages.
I noticed that hell too resides in the underworld dimension.
This constant thinking is my problem.

There’s an atmospheric change.
It’s got to be this global warming everyone talks about,
’cause all that I see appears to be in darker shades.
Flawless. Like vogue air-brushing.
Everything smells musty too like there’s a mold infestation,
but really there isn’t any. Really, I’ve looked.
It’s cold mostly so I never forget to put my cerulean sweater on.

These walls have looked no different since my 13th birthday but they feel much taller.
Barricading or thwarting, I can’t decide.
It’s mostly a low-frequency rumble here: a bit too quiet at times.
Better than the beeping ambulances last year I suppose.

Where are my parents?
All I can recall is watching my brother move out a while ago, without saying goodbye.
He stopped acknowledging my presence since that day.

But it’s the new faces in this house that bother me.
They arrive in batches as if this were a Bed n’ Breakfast
but leave soon after I nudge them to stop sleeping in my bed.

Yesterday that boy in basketball shorts turned as pale as his t-shirt when I showed him the used butter knife he had left on the breakfast slab the previous night.
Just plain old lack of chivalry.

I am not a whiner to not share my space or time with anyone,
but I don’t like spectators while I’m naked.
Why do they barge in unannounced while I’m in the middle of my four-time daily bathing routine to get this festering black muck off my body?
An allergy. That’s my diagnosis,
‘cause I can only get a doctor sprinting out of the door every time I talk about it.

But I think it’s my strength that seems to be deteriorating each day.
I can’t eat anything ‘cause I’m not hungry at all.
Come to think of it, it’s actually my memory that seems to have faded since the day my parents left to see the doctor after they caught the flu.

Aunt April called that day and told me that Nonna couldn’t make it through the flu.
I wonder why she would lie to me blatantly, ‘cause Nonna is the only one who visits me every now and then, although she’s too old you know.
Can’t see anything, doesn’t say anything.

My brother too left coughing blood that day.
Said he’d be back after consulting the doctor.

He did tell me not to look under the bed and I remember trying my best not to
and I don’t really remember why,
but I think I did.

All I felt was a shove at my derriere (obviously it was my brother) and I tumbled into the circle manned by the legs of many people and stared directly into the black almond eyes with a hint of red in it. And there was a stench. Probably of my shock and fear.

I squealed slightly (although I wanted to scream but I partly lost my voice in that moment) and scrambled up to my feet, trying to get away. But some people held me up and tried to calm me down.

This time when I looked at what beast those eyes belonged to, I found that it was merely a white Spit but a strange one at that. It seemed to be lacking its front legs. Although I know today that it must be a genetic anomaly, back then in Class 1, when this incident took place and I was peeking through circus tents curiously, it spooked the hell out of me.

Years later during my graduation, my friend and I were fooling around riding her Kinetic Honda when we met with an accident. I remember while I was passing out, a swarm of people were rushing towards us from as far as my fading peripheral vision reached. The last thing I saw before passing out was the same pair of almond eyes with a hint of red in them. Only this time he smiled at me and said,

don’t tell anyone!

I didn’t.

It’s always been awkward for me.

The meetings, the greetings.

While it was easier to get over my glossophobia by class V (Vaidehi Miss did such a wonderful job with the ‘stuttering me’ that I am unabashedly proud of her efforts), one-to-one personal interactions are still difficult for me to handle.

This one time, while being introduced to a cute boy who had newly come into our class, I distinctly remember that I forgot my name. Makes me cringe every time I think of it. I mean, who does that?

My brother would often hurl jokes at me for my overly shy and under-confident demeanor. One day he said, ‘you’re as awkward as a blind dog in a meat shop’. Although it was educational to learn that metaphor, it gave me the tingles somehow.

In any case, there was no denying that I was quite bashful and awkward in my skin, for I did have my share of weird, or whatever one may call it, encounters.

This one time I was walking down to the library on a warm Sunday afternoon. Suddenly this man stopped me, physically barricading my forward movement. Sweaty. Dark-complexioned. Dark brown eyes encased in reddish sclera. Middle-aged. Haggard old clothes. Greying hair. A cloth rug-sack dangling on his shoulder.

He looked desperate and disoriented, trying to blabber something in kannada, while I was sweating bullets at this unexpected confrontation.

Turns out, this man was a teacher from Dharwad, a city in northern Karnataka.

As if apologizing, he narrated a harrowing tale of being stranded in Mangalore, ‘for ‘academic activities’ where he was robbed off his luggage. He had no money or contacts and had approached me as I looked like a ‘student’, who may be willing to help a ‘teacher’. He said that he was absolutely embarrassed but didn’t know how else to get back home.

He obviously needed some money.

At that moment the woman in me clearly doubted everything about this episode. There was a plethora of feelings.

First, the fear.

He is going to slit my throat.

He may throw acid at me.

He might pull out a kerchief soaked in chloroform to subdue me.

Second, the sinking victim feeling.

Why me?

Did I wear something revealing?

Do I look like I have a lot of money?

Third, guilt.

What if he isn’t lying?

What if Papa was stuck in such a situation?

With a defensive demeanor, I walked past him in a rush thinking about all this. I wanted to just disappear. Yet a bit further, the thought of my father in a similar situation stopped me. I decided to give him whatever little money I had, even if he was tricking me to extort it.

I traced my steps back, found him and gave him the money.

He said,

You are a ‘vidyarthi’, I am an ‘adhyapaka’ all I can bless you with is ‘vidya’.

By the time I reached the library, it felt eerie, as if someone was staring at my back. I turned around to find the same teacher standing across the road. Only this time, he looked confident, had a smile on his face and with an all-knowing gaze whispered in kannada,

don’t tell anyone!

I didn’t.

Hostel life was disorienting for me. I was out of home for the first time. But there was also a new sense of freedom: no Mama hovering over my head. So I’d get out for strolls in the canopied lanes of the neighbourhood with bonsai-lined houses every now and then either with a friend or alone, usually at dusk. The aroma of the night-blooming cestrum flowers was heady and added a romance to the air. And a migraine, after.

One evening, I noticed there was someone trailing me during my walk. I turned around and saw a man, probably a vagabond in oversized baggy clothes walking behind me. He had bloodshot eyes, salt n’ pepper spikes for hair, but the most weirdly familiar thing about him was the spring in his walk. It was like he was missing his arms entirely, so, to be able to balance himself on his two legs, he would spring up and down like a kangaroo, or maybe a two-legged dog.

As cautious and self-preserving as I was, I quickly walked around to a bakery near my hostel. I decided to spend some time there, so that the stranger would simply move on.

I spent a good half an hour in the bakery indulging in their delicious sugar doughnuts and savoury chicken rolls after which I decided to head out, only to find the strange little springy man waiting unabashedly for me. With no other way to mask my location from him, I headed to the hostel with him trailing me. That night I peeked through my balcony at the road in front of the hostel. This guy was still standing there, staring up.

I panicked and wondered whether I should tell this to anyone. But I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I gave up walking and peeking through the balcony for a bit.

After a week, I went out to meet some batch-mates nearby. I consciously scanned my surroundings every now and then but couldn’t find the stranger anywhere. With some respite in his absence, I got out for my walk the next day to get some air. Just as I hit my favourite bonsai-lined house, he came out of nowhere right in front of me and began blabbering. The sheer shock of his encounter sent me sprinting until I  tripped over something and fell face down. By the time I managed to get back to the hostel, I had a torn pair of jeans, a sodded T-shirt, a bleeding knee and elbow, a bruised chin and the nightmare of having been touched by him.

No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get him off the hook. He was everywhere: at my college, the library, the bakery, the nook, the corner. Everywhere.

A time came when I started meeting a guy friend in the evenings, of course, trailed by the springy man whom I still hadn’t mentioned to anyone. One night as I peeped through my window, I saw him standing at the hostel gate with a bouquet of dried wild weeds. The moment he caught my eye, he pulled out a match box and set it on fire, did something obnoxious and scooted away springing.

Although it felt uncanny, I was relieved thinking I wouldn’t see him again.

One day around dusk, I was returning from lab duty at my hospital. I couldn’t get a ride but wanted to return to my room before I had a headache. So, I took the shortest route I knew on foot. It was warm but breezy and the time for trees to shed their leaves. Although it was way past siesta time, it was quieter than usual.

I was startled by someone who cooed at me from one of the houses. I turned and saw the same springy man. He was standing in one of the porches. Only this time, he stood more confident and upright. And when he spoke, he did not blabber. He looked straight at me, smiled and said,

don’t tell anyone!

I didn’t.

But I felt something wasn’t right. Something mighty was weighing me down.

I got back to the hostel. Deep in thought, I crashed into a girl retreating with a cup of tea.

She immediately retorted,

What’s wrong with you? Are you crazy?

I left for  home that week. Lying down one night, I stared straight out of the window at the full moon, letting things cross my mind freely.

Am I crazy?

Why can’t I talk to anyone about things?

Can people see that something’s not okay with me?

Then suddenly outside my reverie, I noticed someone jumping from one terrace to another. In the stillness of the world past midnight, he seemed like the only thing evidently moving.

Is that a thief?

Or a banshee?

The hair on my body stood starkly up. My heart was thudding like an engine with no escape. It was as if everything I knew had ceased to exist and I was in a corner of a white room with no doors or windows. I was staring into the biggest pair of black eyes with a hint of red at an alien suspended in thin air. This creature was so close to me, only the open window separating us.

The moment I felt blood in my legs, I sprang and dashed out to my parent’s room. As I was about to wake Mum up, the creature leapt to the window of this room and whispered, with decided eyes and an all-knowing smile,

don’t tell anyone!

I didn’t.

But a part of me spoke to me.

And I wrote down all that I can’t say.

Maybe someone someday will read this and know what to do.

“Garrett?” A muffled voice from a room nearby.

“Yeah, it’s me.” Garrett shook his hands, dropping more rain to the floor and wiped his face with his sleeve. “Do you hear something buzzing?” He surveyed the living room but couldn’t locate the sound. “What is that?”

“I think it’s my cell phone.” She did not exit the room. “I couldn’t find my plug, so I’m using the old one. It shouldn’t be buzzing. Can you check it, please?”

“Nothing like almost starting a fire.” He zeroed in on the cell phone but then looked over at the small kitchen area nearby. He remembered how she used to love to cook and how the kitchen would be bright and smell so good. Now, it was dark and the dishes piled up in the sink. “Guess we’re having takeout again,” he said.

“Are you coming out of the room?” but she didn’t answer him. “Lately, I don’t know what’s wrong with you.”

He moved toward the cell phone, passing by the couch and stopped near the window. He could smell the rain from outside, still feel its dampness on his skin, but it was warm in the apartment. Lately, she was either hot or cold, so she would leave the window open and turn up the heat. But then she would lock herself in the room.

“Are you coming out?” Still, no answer.

On a table near the window was her cell phone with the old cord plugged into an outlet next to it. The buzzing grew louder, and the phone felt hot in his hand. Little white sparks popped into the air and landed on the floor. Shit, he thought and quickly grabbed the cord from the outlet, forgetting his still wet skin, and a large spark popped on his hand, a shock raced through his body. He fell back, feeling a strange sensation of slipping through the floor and falling, just falling, further and further away.

“Garrett? Garrett?” Her voice brought him back. “You okay?” She still didn’t come out of the room. “Garrett, answer me. Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” He felt strange as he sat up, resting a hand on the couch. “Give me a minute.” He pushed against the floor with his other hand, making sure that it was solid. It was. But the room blurred around him, his body hummed, his fingers and toes twitched. He struggled to his feet and looked for the cell phone and cord. The phone was still on the table and the damn cord was in the outlet. He ripped it out of the wall and received another shock. “Damn it!” He dropped the cord to the floor.

“Garrett?”

“Are you coming out?” He shook his head. “Forget it.” Her cell phone rang and he reached for it. But when he held it, that strange sensation returned and he felt himself fall.

A bubbling sound snapped him out of it. He looked toward the kitchen. It was bright. There were hardly any dishes in the sink but what was next to them? He held the phone and approached the sink. It looked like a bottle. A baby bottle? The bubbling grew louder; the phone buzzed.

The strange vibration returned and the kitchen darkened. The dishes were piled up in the sink again and there was no bottle with them. And no pot bubbling.

She slipped out of her room and walked toward the bathroom. “Hey, you okay?”

“Fine.” He scratched his head. “I know I saw it.”

“Saw what?” She didn’t wait for an answer, closing the bathroom door behind her.

The phone rang again, chased by that strange vibration, and the kitchen brightened with more bubbling sounds. Crying filled the apartment. Was that a baby?

The phone rang again. “Come on.” The kitchen turned dark. “What the fuck is going on? Am I losing my mind?”

“What’s your problem?” She opened the bathroom door a crack.

“Did you hear a baby crying?”

“What?”

“A baby. Did you hear a baby crying?”

“No.” Her voice shook a little. “Why would there be a baby crying in here?”

“I don’t know. What about the pasta? I thought you were making us dinner.”

“Dinner? When was the last time that I cooked us dinner?”

He couldn’t remember, but there was a pot that was just boiling over. And there was a bottle, a baby bottle in the sink. A baby was crying but she was right. Why would there be a baby crying in here?

The phone rang again, and she said, “Oh, for fuck’s sake. Tell Florida to stop calling me with their damn robo calls.”

“She said…”

“This isn’t Florida calling.” He recognized the voice, but it was impossible. It was his voice. “Hello?”

“Hello? Who is this?”

“Where are you?” He flinched at the man’s tone, and the call ended.

The kitchen was bright and there she was, wearing blue jeans and a white flowered top. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, her light brown arms moving almost rhythmically as she stirred the pot. She smiled and he hadn’t seen that smile in a very long time.

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like… I don’t know. Like I’m someone else.” She turned off the stove.

“I don’t know.” He glanced at the phone in his hand. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. What are you wearing?” She laughed. How he had missed that sound!

“Wait. What do you mean by what I’m wearing?” He glanced at the couch and the manila folder was gone. “I’m wearing my work clothes and they’re wet from the rain outside.”

“Rain? They didn’t predict rain today.”

He touched his coat that was still draped over the arm of the couch. It was dry. He glanced over at the apartment door. No muddy footprints. No droplets of rain on the wooden floor and the carpet by the door was a different color, brownish red.

“You okay?”

A baby cried.

“Can you watch the pasta? It’s ready. I have to check on Anna.” She hurried away from him. “Garrett? Earth to Garrett?”

“Anna? Who’s Anna?” The phone in his hand rang again. “Come on,” he muttered.

“Your daughter.”

“What?”

“Don’t hang up on me.” He was back on the other end of the phone. “We need to talk.”

“I don’t know who you are.”

“Don’t you, Garrett?”

The kitchen was dark and muddy footprints stained the greenish-brown rug. Droplets of water rested against the floor. He touched his coat. It was soaked. But there was no pasta ready to be served, there was no baby, no Anna.

“What happened? Why do I keep switching… realities?”

“I don’t know,” he said and the call ended.

“Jen? Jen?”

“I’m still in the bathroom,” she answered. “Who were you talking to?”

“Jen, I need to talk to you.” He approached the bathroom. “Please, open the door. Jen, please.” He could hear her sigh on the other side. “I have to ask you something but not through the door.”

The bathroom door opened and Jen stepped toward him. She was wearing a pair of gray jogging pants and a black T-shirt. Her hair was down, hugging her shoulders, and her light brown arms folded in front of her chest. She seemed thin compared to her other self and her face was wet like she had been crying.

“Who’s Anna?”

The color drained from her face. “How do you know that name?”

He stared at her and it hit him. She had been crying a lot lately but she never said why. “Are you okay?”

“Am I okay?” She laughed and it was not that beautiful sound that he had heard a few moments before. This laugh was bitter. “Am I okay? No, Garrett, I’m not okay. Now, how the fuck do you know that name?”

“You spoke her name.”

“No, I never did. Never to you.”

“You said that she was…” The pain in her eyes pierced through him. “Never mind.” He stepped back. “Forget it. Just forget it.”

“She was what?” Her voice was a whisper, and tears slipped down her face.

“I don’t know what’s going on. I’m sorry, Jen. I’m just confused right now.”

“You’re always so lost in your own shit.” She slammed the bathroom door shut.

The phone rang again and it was him. “Help me,” he said. “I don’t know where I am.”

“You’re in the apartment but which one?”

“No, not anymore. I think I fell through the floor this time and I’m still falling.” Those words chilled him to the bone. “I need to get back. How do I get back home?”

The phone went dead. “Hello? Hello?”

“Another robo call? I swear that they don’t stop calling me from Texas.”

He looked at Jen, who smiled back at him, setting the table.

“So, why are you wearing those clothes again? You’re dressing like you did when you worked at your old job.”

He looked over at the couch. No manila folder. “I left that job? Why would I do that?”

“Because of your supervisor, silly. You couldn’t stand working for her and it was too much stress for you. So you left, and now you have a better, higher-paying job. You  can wear casual work clothes. Oh, can you get Anna, please? I changed her diaper and she just needs to be carried into the kitchen.”

“You want me to hold her?”

“I thought we got past that. Never mind. I’ll get her. You just take a seat, and I’ll be right out.”

The phone rang again. “I have a daughter?”

“Don’t you care that I’m falling somewhere God knows where?” He flinched at the man’s tone. “Yes, you have a daughter. At least, I do. What happened to yours?” No answer. “I don’t think I’m falling anymore but I’m not back at the apartment. At least, I don’t think so. Where are you?”

“Your place.” He sat at the table and looked over at Jen but she didn’t have the baby. She was his Jen and she was staring at him like he was crazy. “My place,” and the call ended.

“Seriously, who are you talking to?” She asked.

“No one. Just myself.” He smiled at that, but Jen did not look amused.

“Were you going to place an order for dinner or are we just skipping that tonight?” She looked at the phone in his hand. “That’s my phone. Why are you using it?” She reached for it but he moved away from her.

“I was going to place an order. I’m sorry I’m using your phone. What do you want for dinner?”

“I don’t care. Where’s your cell phone? Why don’t you use it instead of mine?”

“Where is my phone? Shit.” He searched his pockets. Nothing. He checked his coat. Still nothing. He checked the manila folder. “Thank God,” he sighed, but his phone was dead. “I have to charge it.”

“Fine. Use my phone. I don’t care.” She moved away from the table. “I’m not hungry anyway. I don’t know why I even came out of the bathroom.”

“Jen.” She looked at him. “What did I do to you?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes, it matters. For almost a year, it’s been like living with a stranger. We barely sleep in the same room anymore.”

“So what? You miss the sex? Is that it? Is that the only thing that you miss?”

“No. Yes.” He stepped closer and reached for her but she pulled away from him. “I miss us, Jen. What we were once.”

“We were a fucking mess, Garrett. We still are.” She stormed away from him.

“I know about Anna.” She froze mid-step but refused to look at him. “I know about our daughter,” and the painful look in her eyes broke his heart. “Why isn’t she here with us?”

“Who told you?” Her voice filled with venom. “Who told you?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I want to know! Now,” she screamed, and he flinched.

“You. You told me, Jen.”

“Me? I don’t know what kind of sick game you’re playing tonight, but it’s not funny, Garrett. I’m not laughing.” No, she was crying.

“Jen.”

Jen covered her mouth and hurried into the bathroom, slamming the door shut behind her. Her sobs still escaped the room.

“Jen? Jen, please talk to me.” He hurried over to the bathroom. “Please,” but she didn’t answer him.

The phone rang in his hand. A baby giggled.

“Something wrong with dinner?” Jen asked.

“What?” He looked down at the plate in front of him. The pasta looked good, but his stomach turned. He felt cold, sick. Maybe, the human body was not meant to slip in-between worlds, if that was what he was doing. “No, dinner looks good.”

“You okay? You’re pale. And why are you holding my phone? Where’s yours?”

“It needs to be charged.” He looked at Anna.

“She was cranky today.” Jen bounced the baby on her lap and gave her a little piece of pasta. “We kept ourselves busy though.”

He continued to stare at Anna. “She’s beautiful.”

“Why are you looking at Anna like you’ve never seen her before?”

“Jen, can I ask you something?” He looked at her.

“Sure.” She ate some pasta.

“Was there a moment where you might not have had Anna?” He watched Jen’s fork crash into her plate and she almost choked on her food.

She covered Anna’s ears. “Why the fuck would you ask me that?”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry? You have no right to ask me that.”

“But I’m asking, Jen and I need to know. Please. Please, Jen.”

She looked at Anna, who played with a rattle in her hands. “Yes, there was a moment,” she said.

“Why? Why would you do that?”

She laughed. It was that bitter laugh. “Why? Because we weren’t in a good place, Garrett. I didn’t think we were going to make it and I didn’t want to bring her into that. It wouldn’t be fair to her and I didn’t want you to stay with me because of her.”

“So, you were going to decide not to have her?”

“You have no idea, Garrett. No fucking idea.” She flinched. She forgot to cover Anna’s ears. “She’s too young to remember anyway and you know what, Garrett? If I had made that decision, it would have been my choice.”

“What about me?”

“What about you? You were lost in your own shit all the time. You forgot about me.”

“I never forgot about you. I’m sorry if it seemed that way.”

Anna started to cry. Jen quickly hugged her. “Why are we even talking about this? I decided and now we have Anna. And we are doing much better together. All of us. Aren’t we?”

He flinched at her question, thinking about his own Jen. “Yes, we’re doing much better now.”

“And if I had made that decision, it would have torn me apart.” She looked at him, tears pouring down her face. Now, she seemed like his Jen. “It would have ended us.”

The phone rang and he felt as if the floor gave way. He fell through the wooden surface and into nothing and he couldn’t stop falling. Would his other self be able to save him?

Somehow, he pressed the phone to his ear. Please, he thought. Please, save me. “Are you there?”

He said, “I think I’m returning home now. Are you?”

“I’m falling and I can’t stop falling.” The phone beeped in his hand. One bar left. “Help me.”

“What’s wrong with Jen? Your Jen.”

“Leave her alone.” The darkness closed in. The phone beeped. “I need to get back to her.”

“I’m home now.” His voice sounded distant. “You should be too. Good-bye.”

“Wait! Please don’t hang up on me!”

He felt himself fall, hitting against a hard surface. It was the wooden floor of his apartment. He was lying in front of the bathroom door and Jen was stepping out of the bedroom with her coat on and a suitcase in her hand.

“Oh my God, Garrett. Are you okay? And why are you still holding my phone?”

“I’m okay.” He struggled to sit up on the floor. “Where are you going?”

Jen looked at the suitcase. “I think you know the answer to that. Now, are you okay?”

“Not if you’re about to leave me.”

“I have to.” She moved past him. “I should’ve left a long time ago. I don’t know why I didn’t.” She opened the apartment door.

“Jen, please, please don’t go.”

The phone rang again. The last bar fading as if warning this would be the last time but maybe, it would be better, if he was there. He wanted to see Jen smile at him like she did before. He wanted to see Anna but the phone just rang again.

“Don’t let her leave,” he said. “She needs you and you need her.” His voice faded away.

“Jen, I know it was a hard decision that you made.”

“Do you?” She glared at him. “You don’t know anything.”

“Yes, I do.” He stood up and moved over to her. “I know, Jen.”

“Yeah. What do you know?”

“That you didn’t think we were going to make it and you didn’t want to bring her into that. You didn’t want me to stay with you because of her.”

She stepped back, shaking her head. “Those are my thoughts, not yours.” She looked at him. “How do you know what I was thinking? You couldn’t know. Maybe I talked in my sleep. Did that person on the phone tell you? Who were you talking to?”

“I saw her. I saw our daughter, Jen, and she was beautiful.”

Jen slapped him across the face. “I’m sorry, Garrett. I don’t know why I did that.”

“I deserve it. I should never have made you feel so forgotten.” That word made her mouth fall open in surprise and he took her hand in his. “We weren’t in a good place and you were right to think that we weren’t going to make it. I didn’t think we were going to make it either.”

“How do you know all this? How could you possibly know any of this?”

“Because I do know, Jen. I know. I know how hard that decision was for you and that I wasn’t there when you needed me. I was lost in my own shit and I’m sorry. I am so sorry, Jen.”

“It’s too late, Garrett. It’s just too late.” She pulled her hand away and wiped some tears off her face. “We’re still a mess and nothing’s going to change that.” She walked into the hallway.

“You’re right.” She paused at his words. “You said that if you made that decision, it would have torn you apart.” She looked at him. “You were right about it ending us because here we are at the end.”

“I never said any of that.”

The phone buzzed in his hand. The last bar faded away.

“Could I say one last thing before you go?” He brushed a tear aside.

“Okay. One last thing, Garrett, and then I’m leaving.”

“You would have loved her.”

“Who?”

“Our daughter, Anna. For the few minutes that I had with her, she was amazing, beautiful. She had my eyes but your face. And she giggled, Jen. I didn’t get a chance to hold her and I wish I did now. But I saw her and you would have loved her.”

Jen burst into tears. He hurried over to her, hugging her tight. “Did you see her,” she whispered into his ear. “Did you really see her, our daughter?”

“I did. Do you believe me?”

“I don’t know why.” Her eyes met his. “I do but why now? Why today?”

“I don’t know.” He took the suitcase from Jen and led her back to the apartment. Their feet rested next to the muddy footprints. “It must mean something.”

“Maybe it does. Maybe we will see her again?”

He touched her face. “Maybe we will,” and she smiled at him with that smile.

“Oh, one thing,” Jen said.

“What?”

“Can I have my phone back?” He laughed, closing the apartment door behind them.